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Lewes was already married to a pretty woman named Agnes, who practiced free love so successfully that four of the Lewes' eight children were hers but not his. A professed liberal and a kindly man, Lewes acknowledged all of Agnes' offspring officially as his own. By doing so, he permanently lost all grounds for divorcing his wife for adultery—the only grounds permitted under Victorian law. Thus blocked from propriety, he and Mary Anne in 1854 decided to live in sin and openly did so for 24 years, until Lewes' death in 1878. Except for fellow freethinkers, few friends came to call. Mary Anne's brother and sister refused even to write. The pair bore this uncomplainingly. But when a woman twitted Mary Anne by mail about taking the marriage sacrament lightly, she struck back. "Women who are content with light and easily broken ties do not act as I have done," she wrote, drawing a nice distinction between herself and those who practiced secret adultery. "They obtain what they desire and are invited to dinner."
Was She Maggie? To the self-pitying and self-indulgent age of the 1960s, the dedication to duty and sheer hard work of such Victorians, however stuffy, stirs profound admiration. "Mr. and Mrs. George Lewes," as the couple meticulously called themselves, certainly do. In their first years of living together they occasionally went hungry. But they worked on, side by side, scraping and scrimping in a succession of cheap lodgings, managing to stay alive and support Lewes' other family. Lewes churned out a two-volume life of Goethe (it is still in print).
Mary Anne, who was expert in Hebrew, Greek, Latin, German and French, did translations. Then one day, when she was 37 years old, Lewes overcame his wife's diffidence about her literary abilities and got her to write fiction. One story, Scenes of Clerical Life, was an instant success. Next, in 1859, came Adam Bede. Like the first stories, this novel was written under the pen name devised by Mary Anne to protect her from the critics. She borrowed her husband's first name and added Eliot because, she explained, it is "a good, mouth-filling, easily pronounced word."
The rest, alas, is literary history. Perhaps inevitably, Biographer Gordon Haight, a Yale professor and the world's foremost George Eliot scholar, temporarily lapses into a kind of chronological literary Baedeker. Much of his detail is of interest mainly to people who really want to know what sort of financial deals Lewes made for "George," or who wonder if Maggie in The Mill on the Floss really was George Eliot. (Naturally, she was and she wasn't.) He explains how, as a moralistic realist. George Eliot drew on Mary Anne Evans' country girlhood for the low talk of her everyday characters—whose rudeness shocked Victorians. With her remarkable intellectual powers, she delved into the Renaissance, which she used as a background for Romola. In her last book, Daniel Deronda, she created not only a contemporary Jewish novel but a reasoned and impassioned plea, 20 years before the Zionist movement was founded, for reuniting the dispersed Jews in Palestine.