GE to Caroline [Mrs. Charles] Bray, London, 20 March 1877
Title
GE to Caroline [Mrs. Charles] Bray, London, 20 March 1877
Title
GE to Caroline [Mrs. Charles] Bray, London, 20 March 1877
Sender
George Eliot
Recipient
Caroline [Mrs. Charles] Bray
Date(s)
- 1877-03-20
Place
London
Letter Content
GE to Caroline [Mrs. Charles] Bray, London, 20 March 1877
MS: Yale. Extracts published: Cross, III, 305-306.
The Priory, | 21. North Bank, | Regents Park.
March 20. 77.
My dear Cara
Your letter on the breakfast table was just what I had long been wishing for, and I had not earned the good by writing to you only because I had rather dolorous news to tell of ourselves. At the beginning of February Mr. Lewes was seized with rheumatic gout, and for some time was either not able to leave his bed or else only able to move by the help of two sticks. Imagine my anguish in sight both of that present and the possible future -- for him whose light quick step has always been unlike every other to my ear. But at the end of three weeks he could get along without a stick and now he walks as well as ever. I was not well before his attack came, but of course I forgot all about my back-ache in running and carrying, standing and lifting, as a nurse must do -- and I suppose all this was the worst possible regimen for my body, so that as soon as my patient got well, I broke down with my old ailment which only began to mend greatly four or five days ago. However, I am able now to take a walk as well as a drive, and to sit through a long concert, 623 and unless I have a relapse into evil conditions I hope soon to be no weaker than usual.
Your good news really helps the cure. The relief to dear Mr. Bray's bodily suffering is the foremost good, but next to that I rejoice in your getting freedom from the greater part of the monetary anxieties which have worried you. I think Mr. Bray's mind will be much the easier, and this is so important when all one's energy is demanded to bear pain of body that I can't help longing for the sale of the Sydenham house too, seeing that Mrs. Winnall 624 might be provided with another by the help of her parents.
Please give my tender love to Sarah [sic] and tell her that the years make the memory of her always dearer to me. I grieve to think of this liability to bronchitis which I feel sure is a greater trial than anything I have known -- tearing chest and head at once. One can only long that the spring will be a gentle one and confirm her recovery.
You must read Harriet Martineau's Autobiography. While I was ill Mr. Lewes took my office of reader and for the most part read the first two volumes to me. The account of her childhood and early youth is most pathetic and interesting, but 'ablike'bb as in all books of the kind the charm departs as the life advances, and the writer has to tell of her own triumphs. One regrets continually that she felt it necessary not only to tell of her intercourse with many more or less distinguished persons -- which would have been quite pleasant to everybody -- but also to pronounce upon their entire merits and demerits, especially when, if she had died as soon [as] she expected, these persons would nearly all have been living to read her gratuitous rudenesses. But I rejoiced profoundly in the conquest of right feeling which determined her to leave the great, sad breach with her once beloved brother in almost total silence, and as I did not read Mrs. Chapman's volume (Mr. Lewes having glanced through it and told me that it was worthless) I was feeling hardly anything about the book but satisfaction in the picture of a life which was on the whole thoroughly virtuous, beneficent and dignified, until I found (what Mr. Lewes had not observed) that this wretched Mrs. Chapman has been so forsaken of all the good as to enter into details and accusations connected with that very quarrelling which Harriet Martineau had willed to bury in silence. Really there is nothing but imbecility to be pleaded as a reason why Mrs. Chapman's conduct should not be called wicked. Then again, she has published H.M's private letters -- at the end of the very book which begins with a solemn protest against any such publication!
Browning observed to me that Miss Martineau's procedure in demanding back her own letters, made it the more reprehensible for her to enter into statements about her relations with others, because her own letters being destroyed there remained no evidence to check her statements. And one cannot help being convinced that her representations are often false, not from any untruthfulness in her but from the extremely self-satisfied point of view with which she regarded her transactions with business acquaintances and her intercourse with friends.
Still, in spite of Mrs. Chapman, I hope the book will do more good than harm. Many of the most interesting little stories in it about herself and others she had told me (and Mr. Atkinson) when I was staying with her, almost in the very same words. But they were all the better for being told in her silvery voice. She was a charming talker, and a perfect lady in her manners as a hostess. It is a comfort to think -- looking back on the vile treatment she received from the Quarterly and Frazers, making people believe that she was a coarse-minded, repulsive woman 625 -- that such blackguardism in print could not be tolerated now, and that it would hardly enter into anybody's mind to conceive such sentences for any form of outward utterance.
I do hope that Rufa is coming home to some years of settled domestic enjoyment, now that her chief anxiety about Frank is removed. If you write to her again will you ask her to remember that we always think of her and Mr. Call with affection and hope to see them before we go into the country. That will not be till June. And we are only going to bivouac in our Surrey home for a few months, to try what alterations are necessary. We shall come back to this corner in the Autumn. [3 words deleted.] We don't think of giving up London altogether at present -- but we may have to give up life before we come to any decision on that minor point.
Your loving
Marian.
MS: Yale. Extracts published: Cross, III, 305-306.
The Priory, | 21. North Bank, | Regents Park.
March 20. 77.
My dear Cara
Your letter on the breakfast table was just what I had long been wishing for, and I had not earned the good by writing to you only because I had rather dolorous news to tell of ourselves. At the beginning of February Mr. Lewes was seized with rheumatic gout, and for some time was either not able to leave his bed or else only able to move by the help of two sticks. Imagine my anguish in sight both of that present and the possible future -- for him whose light quick step has always been unlike every other to my ear. But at the end of three weeks he could get along without a stick and now he walks as well as ever. I was not well before his attack came, but of course I forgot all about my back-ache in running and carrying, standing and lifting, as a nurse must do -- and I suppose all this was the worst possible regimen for my body, so that as soon as my patient got well, I broke down with my old ailment which only began to mend greatly four or five days ago. However, I am able now to take a walk as well as a drive, and to sit through a long concert, 623 and unless I have a relapse into evil conditions I hope soon to be no weaker than usual.
Your good news really helps the cure. The relief to dear Mr. Bray's bodily suffering is the foremost good, but next to that I rejoice in your getting freedom from the greater part of the monetary anxieties which have worried you. I think Mr. Bray's mind will be much the easier, and this is so important when all one's energy is demanded to bear pain of body that I can't help longing for the sale of the Sydenham house too, seeing that Mrs. Winnall 624 might be provided with another by the help of her parents.
Please give my tender love to Sarah [sic] and tell her that the years make the memory of her always dearer to me. I grieve to think of this liability to bronchitis which I feel sure is a greater trial than anything I have known -- tearing chest and head at once. One can only long that the spring will be a gentle one and confirm her recovery.
You must read Harriet Martineau's Autobiography. While I was ill Mr. Lewes took my office of reader and for the most part read the first two volumes to me. The account of her childhood and early youth is most pathetic and interesting, but 'ablike'bb as in all books of the kind the charm departs as the life advances, and the writer has to tell of her own triumphs. One regrets continually that she felt it necessary not only to tell of her intercourse with many more or less distinguished persons -- which would have been quite pleasant to everybody -- but also to pronounce upon their entire merits and demerits, especially when, if she had died as soon [as] she expected, these persons would nearly all have been living to read her gratuitous rudenesses. But I rejoiced profoundly in the conquest of right feeling which determined her to leave the great, sad breach with her once beloved brother in almost total silence, and as I did not read Mrs. Chapman's volume (Mr. Lewes having glanced through it and told me that it was worthless) I was feeling hardly anything about the book but satisfaction in the picture of a life which was on the whole thoroughly virtuous, beneficent and dignified, until I found (what Mr. Lewes had not observed) that this wretched Mrs. Chapman has been so forsaken of all the good as to enter into details and accusations connected with that very quarrelling which Harriet Martineau had willed to bury in silence. Really there is nothing but imbecility to be pleaded as a reason why Mrs. Chapman's conduct should not be called wicked. Then again, she has published H.M's private letters -- at the end of the very book which begins with a solemn protest against any such publication!
Browning observed to me that Miss Martineau's procedure in demanding back her own letters, made it the more reprehensible for her to enter into statements about her relations with others, because her own letters being destroyed there remained no evidence to check her statements. And one cannot help being convinced that her representations are often false, not from any untruthfulness in her but from the extremely self-satisfied point of view with which she regarded her transactions with business acquaintances and her intercourse with friends.
Still, in spite of Mrs. Chapman, I hope the book will do more good than harm. Many of the most interesting little stories in it about herself and others she had told me (and Mr. Atkinson) when I was staying with her, almost in the very same words. But they were all the better for being told in her silvery voice. She was a charming talker, and a perfect lady in her manners as a hostess. It is a comfort to think -- looking back on the vile treatment she received from the Quarterly and Frazers, making people believe that she was a coarse-minded, repulsive woman 625 -- that such blackguardism in print could not be tolerated now, and that it would hardly enter into anybody's mind to conceive such sentences for any form of outward utterance.
I do hope that Rufa is coming home to some years of settled domestic enjoyment, now that her chief anxiety about Frank is removed. If you write to her again will you ask her to remember that we always think of her and Mr. Call with affection and hope to see them before we go into the country. That will not be till June. And we are only going to bivouac in our Surrey home for a few months, to try what alterations are necessary. We shall come back to this corner in the Autumn. [3 words deleted.] We don't think of giving up London altogether at present -- but we may have to give up life before we come to any decision on that minor point.
Your loving
Marian.
Signature
Marian.
Citation
George Eliot, GE to Caroline [Mrs. Charles] Bray, London, 20 March 1877, Complete George Eliot Letters(2026), George Eliot Archive, edited by Beverley Park Rilett. https://GeorgeEliotArchive.org, Accessed September 7, 2026. https://www.georgeeliotarchive.org/items/show/93282