George Eliot in Society: Travels Abroad and Sundays at the Priory by Kathleen McCormack (review)

In George Eliot in Society: Travels Abroad and Sundays at the Priory, Kathleen McCormack adds another significant dimension to our understanding of George Eliot as a person and as a writer by focusing on the social aspects of her time with George Henry Lewes and John Walter Cross. She also provides a useful chronology of their travels abroad (155-56) and a rather extensive bibliography (157-58).

In her study, McCormack relies on Eliot's published journals and letters, Lewes's unpublished diaries and journals from the Beinecke collection, and an impressively wide variety of both well-known and little-known sources. In discussing Sundays at the Priory, McCormack introduces those in attendance by using the lists that Lewes faithfully kept in his diaries. She merely mentions well-known friends and relatives but provides detailed descriptions along with her own speculations about their less well-known guests. In each chapter McCormack makes a point of illustrating the variety of social classes and gender roles represented and the number of artists, musicians, and writers who were among their friends. She also considers the various motives that might have prompted the guests to attend, as well as the similarities the guests may have had to the characters in Eliot's novels. Another point she stresses is the way in which Lewes used his contacts with their friends to further Eliot's publications (as well as his own) and to try to ensure that her novels and poetry were favorably received. McCormack also observes that the characters in Eliot's novels became more sophisticated and varied through the years, as did her acquaintances and social contacts.

Even though McCormack stresses the fact that gay and lesbian guests attended the gatherings, she makes it very clear that Eliot always advocated marriage as the preferred state for everyone (105). In this connection, she appropriately quotes from Edith Simcox's Autobiography of a Shirtmaker, but incorrectly refers to a "discussion of her employee Mary Harrison's marital chances" (104). She should have referred to Mary Hamilton, who was Simcox's partner in Hamilton and Company, the shirtmaking cooperative.

McCormack makes it clear that even though both Eliot and Lewes were acquainted with salons and spas before they met, their shared experiences at the spas were vital to their relationship, to their being "accepted," and to her success as a writer. The couple visited spas together from the time they began their courtship in 1853 (39), and in their German travels together in 1854-55, they spent five happy days in an out-of-the-way spot in Ilmenau and in and around Weimar. During the period between 1866 and 1868, "the Leweses" developed their routine of visiting European spas with the primary goal of better health for one or both of them; however, they were also "quite deliberately, building a social circle that eventually matured into the guest list for Sundays at the Priory" (37). It was at Schwalbach and Schlangenbad in 1866 that they established their mountain-spa routine, which consisted of drinking the waters; having showers, wraps, and baths; listening to music; and engaging in such leisure-time activities as walking, reading, and conversing with other guests. McCormack also links the spa visits that Eliot and Cross made on their honeymoon to his "attack of mental illness" in Venice (142).

Throughout the text, McCormack makes regular references to contemporary periodicals; many of these are simply to help identify the acquaintances of George Eliot and Lewes. For example, she mentions George Eliot's visit with the editor of the Academy, Charles Appleton, in Oxford (75), and she examines George Augustus Simcox's review of Robert Lytton's work and Frederic Harrison's obituary of Lewes, both of which appeared in the Academy (107-8, 127). She identifies Nannie Smith and Isabella Blythe as journalists who contributed to the English Woman's Journal (93...