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New George Eliot Letters at the Huntington

1991; University of Pennsylvania Press; Volume: 54; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/3817107

1544-399X

Rosemary Ashton,

American and British Literature Analysis

In the summer of 1989 the Huntington Library acquired at a London sale of books and manuscripts a small but interesting collection of manuscript letters. The group consists of six letters written between 1852 and 1857 by Marian Evans (later George Eliot) to an unnamed friendeasily deduced from the content of the letters to be the radical publisher John Chapman-and one undated note from Marian Evans's lover, George Henry Lewes, to My dear probably Max Schlesinger, a German journalist and writer living in London. The letters supplement those published by Gordon S. Haight in The George Eliot Letters,1 adding to our knowledge not only of Marian's relatonship with Chapman during the time when they coedited the Westminster Review (1852-54), but also of her relationship with Lewes, who is the subject of letter 4, written in December 1853 and marked Private.2 The first four letters in the group, two written in July 1852, one in August 1853, and one in December 1853, belong to a most interesting-even dramatic-period of Marian Evans's emotional life. Briefly, she had been in love with Chapman, a man with a wife and mistress, in 1851; by July 1852 she was writing passionate letters to Herbert Spencer, who could not bring himself to propose marriage to her, since he found her physically unattractive; and sometime in 1853 she became the lover, for life, of Lewes, who had a wife and three children. Closely related to this volatile private life was Marian Evans's professional career. She and these three most important men in her life had in common freethinking in religion, radicalism in politics, and an interest in the affairs of the radical quarterly periodical, the Westminster Review. The Review is the main subject of these letters.