Relationship With George Eliot
Lewes met writer Marian Evans, later to be famous as George Eliot, in 1851, and by 1854 they had decided to live together. Lewes and Agnes Jervis had agreed to have an open marriage, and in addition to the three children they had together, Agnes had also had several children by other men. Since Lewes was named on the birth certificate as the father of one of these children despite knowing this to be false, and was therefore considered complicit in adultery, he was not able to divorce Agnes. In July 1854 Lewes and Evans travelled to Weimar and Berlin together for the purpose of research.
The trip to Germany also served as a honeymoon as Evans and Lewes were now effectively married, with Evans calling herself Marian Evans Lewes, and referring to Lewes as her husband. It was not unusual for men in Victorian society to have affairs; Charles Dickens, Friedrich Engels and Wilkie Collins had committed relationships with women they were not married to, though more discreetly than Lewes. What was scandalous was the Leweses' open admission of the relationship.
Of his three sons only one, Charles Lewes, survived him; he became a London county councillor.
Read more about this topic: George Henry Lewes
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“Worldly faces never look so worldly as at a funeral. They have the same effect of grating incongruity as the sound of a coarse voice breaking the solemn silence of night.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“Every man is in a state of conflict, owing to his attempt to reconcile himself and his relationship with life to his conception of harmony. This conflict makes his soul a battlefield, where the forces that wish this reconciliation fight those that do not and reject the alternative solutions they offer. Works of art are attempts to fight out this conflict in the imaginative world.”
—Rebecca West (1892–1983)
“The relationship between mother and professional has not been a partnership in which both work together on behalf of the child, in which the expert helps the mother achieve her own goals for her child. Instead, professionals often behave as if they alone are advocates for the child; as if they are the guardians of the child’s needs; as if the mother left to her own devices will surely damage the child and only the professional can rescue him.”
—Elaine Heffner (20th century)
“Love your neighbour, yet pull not down your hedge.”
—British proverb, George Herbert, Jacula Prudentum (1651)
“Our words have wings, but fly not where we would.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)