Sophie and the Sibyl by Patricia Duncker

G.H. Lewes, into the Union Bank of London, Charing Cross Branch, 4 Pall Mall East, Mr. Lewes having an account there.
    I wrote to you many weeks ago from Scilly, enclosing a letter to Chrissey, which if you received it, you would of course put by for her, as it was written in ignorance of her extreme illness. But as I have not received any intimation that my letter reached you, I think it safest to repeat its chief purport, which was to request that you would pay £15 of my present half-year’s income to Chrissey.
    I shall also be much obliged if you will inform me how Chrissey is, and whether she is strong enough to make it desirable for me to write to her.
    Give my love to Sarah and tell her that I am very grateful to her for letting me have news of Chrissey.
    [. . .]
    We are not at all rich people, but we are both workers, and shall have enough for our wants.
    I hope you are well and that Sarah is recovered from her fatigues and anxieties. With love to her and all my tall nephews and nieces,
    I remain, dear Isaac
    Your affectionate sister
    Marian Lewes
     
    Notice that she claims her rightful income, and insists on the importance of her family relationships. All that loving care for her ailing sister Chrissey, who had married a hopeless failure and had her health ruined by constant childbirth. But none of this solicitous obfuscation worked. Isaac Evans smelt a rat. She said that she had changed her name, but not that she had married. If Lewes had three sons and was indeed the respectable scientist and intellectual she said he was, then he must have had some form of a wife. Would it not have been prudent, honest and sensible to mention the fact that he had been, for many years, a widower? But, as in a more famous contemporary narrative, the gentleman possessed ‘a wife now living’. Isaac Evans handed the letter over to his solicitor, and demanded concrete evidence of marriage in a church, a shrewd tactic, which forced Marian Evans to waffle on about sacred bonds and legal contracts in her dignified, unflinching, candid reply. But she still signed herself, defiantly, Marian Lewes. Isaac Evans broke off all communication with his abandoned sister, and forced the rest of his family to do so.
    And herein lies the problem. Marian Evans Lewes, or whichever of her many names you wish to use, insisted upon the value of an integrity she did not actually possess. She wrote thousands of pages defending the so-called sacred bonds, all of which proved in need of sharper definitions. No one could argue that Miss Evans was seduced and betrayed in true nineteenth-century fictional fashion. The writer may have hidden behind a complex web of sexual moralities, a labyrinth that we are still decrypting, but the woman herself stubbornly brazened it out. She insisted on calling herself Mrs. Lewes, never mind the other Mrs. Lewes, whose sons she supported and whose bills she paid.
    Mr. Fowles never bothers with the daring and courageous women of the mid-nineteenth century who fought for social and sexual reform: Caroline Norton, accused of ‘criminal conversation’ with the Prime Minister, who campaigned for the transformation of the divorce laws, Barbara Bodichon, who founded the English Women’s Review , and visited Marian Lewes and to hell with decorum and appearances, Elizabeth Gaskell, who wrote Ruth (1853), championing the virtue and innocence of the young woman seduced. Actually, Gaskell insists so fanatically upon Ruth’s utter innocence that I, for one, have never been able to identify the moment when the wicked Mr. Bellingham makes himself Master of her Person. But possess her he certainly did, because she gives birth to a son, who lives to be proud of his heroic mother. The latter dies in a burst of sanctimonious religiosity. Saved at last!
    The Sibyl saved herself by writing fiction.
     
    END OF CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN
    spins the Wheel of Fortune in unexpected ways. The Reader is invited to place her Bets.
    Prostitutes,