The Road to Character: Chapter 7: Love Summary & Analysis

Mary Anne Evans, whose pen name was George Eliot, was born on November 22, 1819 in Warwickshire, England. Her home was situated between rural farmlands and grimy new coal mines. Her father, whom Mary Anne loved, grew to be a successful land agent. Her mother suffered from ill health and sent her children to boarding school so as not to strain her condition. In response to the lack of her mother’s affection, Mary Anne became needy for love and was afraid of being abandoned. She followed her brother around incessantly and begged him to play. When he got older, he abandoned her for other interests, and Mary Anne was devastated.

In 1835, her mother fell ill and Mary Anne, 16, came home from school to care for her. When her mother died, Mary Anne stayed home to supervise the house. Later on, Mary Anne would write in her famous novel Middlemarch that many women experience a crisis of vocation; their yearning to be heroic makes them want more than what any outlet can give them.

Mary Anne had moral fervor, and it took a religious form in her youth. During this time, scientific advancement threatened Christianity’s validity. Everywhere, people were doubting God’s existence. In response, some people clung more fiercely to religious precepts, while others looked for ways to reinterpret religion. Mary Anne adhered to Christianity’s strictest aspects, denying herself music and fiction. She wanted to lead a life of martyrdom, but her self-renunciation was artificial and narcissistic.

Mary Anne’s intelligence kept her from getting stuck in this artificial religion. She started reading poetry and learning Greek and German. A book by Charles Hennell called An Inquiry Concerning the Origin of Christianity persuaded her that there is no evidence to prove that Jesus was divinely born. Mary Anne then met Hennell’s sister and her husband Charles Bray, who happened to live nearby, and they all became friends. Bray believed that God made the world but is not active in it, and that it is up to man to discover God’s rules and improve the world accordingly. Therefore, he believed in social reform.

Mary Anne still believed in God, but she renounced Christian teachings. She loved life and didn’t want to believe the human world is subordinated to a more perfect one. Instead, she wanted to make moral choices and live virtuously. She told her father she wouldn’t attend church anymore. He warned her about the isolation she would face if she abandoned religion; she would be ostracized, and no one would marry her. She argued that it would be hypocritical to attend church since she didn’t believe.

Mary Anne even told her father she was willing to leave his home because she didn’t want her lack of faith to continue hurting him. This shows her bravery, her desire to strengthen her character, and her passion for living according to the truth. Eventually, she and her father reconciled, agreeing that he would respect her agnosticism if she continued to attend church.

In making this compromise, Mary Anne acknowledged some of her self-indulgence in the feud. She regretted the feud, knowing she took secret delight in creating a scandal. She concluded it was her moral duty to moderate her impulses so as to protect society’s feelings. She was brave and radical but grew to also respect conventions. She believed society was held together by small restraints on personal impulses, and that destroying these restraints would be selfish. From this point on, she cloaked her radicalism in respectability.

Although she is intellectually mature, Mary Anne was a bit of an emotional mess. She was notorious for falling in love with everyone she met. She would engage in intense conversation with someone, mistake it for romantic love, and hope that the other’s love would fill some void in her. Her romantic pursuits always failed. She was not conventionally pretty, and the men she was interested in were usually married or otherwise unavailable. She would go to stay with friends, become intimately attached to the father of the household, and then be made to leave in disgrace.

Once, Mary Anne went to live with John Chapman, an editor, and his wife and mistress. Drama ensued as the women competed for Chapman. Eventually, the mistress and wife banded together against Mary Anne, and she left among whispers of scandal. Some say the absence of motherly affection in Mary Anne made her desperate for love. However, her desire for love also had narcissism in it: she loved her own love and flights of passion. As of yet, she had no one to attach her passion to and give it shape.

In 1852, when she was 32, Mary Anne fell in love with philosopher Herbert Spencer. She wrote him a letter in which she pleaded for his love and also asserted her own for him. This letter signified that she was maturing and taking charge of her life. Although Spencer rejected her, she was beginning to live by her own inner criteria. She became steadier in her passion.

This was an “agency moment” for Mary Anne. The agency moment can happen at any age, or never, in a person’s life. Sometimes, a person is so blown about by things outside of their control that they lose faith in their own agency. They don’t believe they can take control of their lives. Agency develops in a person after great effort. In order to have agency, one must have a deeply engraved inner criteria that guides their action.

Mary Anne’s emotional agency came to fruition when she fell in love with George Lewes. Lewes had a chaotic and poor upbringing. He educated himself in Europe, then returned to London to make a living as a freelance journalist. He is described in mixed terms as an unreliable writer, an adventurer, and a freethinker. He was notoriously ugly. He married a woman named Agnes who later had an affair. By the time he met Mary Anne, he and Agnes were separated.

Lewes and Mary Anne met in a bookstore on October 6, 1851. At first, she was not impressed with him, but over time, his geniality and wit grew on her. The full story of how they fell in love is unknown, but Lewes was gradually rising in Mary Anne’s estimation. They were interested in the same books and ideas. They both believed that love and morality fill the void left by a religion neither could really believe in anymore. 

Since the events of Mary Anne and Lewes’s love story are unknown, Brooks tells the story of Isaiah Berlin and Anna Akhmatova, which he thinks is similar. Akhmatova was a pre-revolutionary poet who’d been prevented from publishing by the Soviets. Her husband had been executed in 1921 and her son imprisoned in 1938. Berlin was visiting Leningrad in 1945 and was introduced to Akhmatova by a friend. They sat on opposite sides of the room and shared life stories, talked about favorite authors, bared their souls, and confessed their loneliness. It was 11 o’clock the next day before they parted. Berlin flung himself into bed and said to himself that he was in love.

Berlin and Akhmatova’s night together represents the ideal communication, shared by two people who believe in the moral, emotional, and existential wisdom found in books, culture, and art. Their communication was one in which intellectual compatibility turned into an emotional connection. Their communion was spiritual, intellectual, and emotional, combining friendship and love. Like them, Mary Anne and Lewes experienced love as a moral force.

According to Brooks, love reorients the soul. First, it humbles a person and reminds them that they aren’t in control of anything, even themselves. Love invades a person little by little, rearranging their energies, desires, and focuses. Love is also a surrender. It makes a person give up their illusions of self-mastery and become vulnerable. It turns a person away from their self-love and makes them love another. A person in love seeks fusion with another and finds that happiness is in someone outside of themselves. Love removes the difference between giving and receiving. A lover isn’t altruistic, because what they give is a piece of themselves.

Secondly, love endows a person with a poetic temperament. Without love, a person lives like Adam I with a utilitarian logic. With love, however, a person experiences feelings they can’t explain. A person in love surrenders to its power without calculating what they’ll lose. Also, a person never falls in love with someone who is useful to them. Rather, they fall in love with whomever stands out to them and is harmonious with them. Moreover, people in love don’t choose each other as a means for happiness.

Love opens a person to spiritual awareness. Their love makes them feel that they are glimpsing a “wordless mystery beyond the human plane.” More practically, love opens a person up to more love. Ultimately, love motivates people to serve others. The person in love engages in selfless and daily acts of care. Sometimes, the passionate period of someone’s relationship engraves such a strong commitment in a person that they naturally offer love without asking for a return. Lewes loved Mary Anne in this way; he celebrated, nurtured, and lifted her above himself.

Mary Anne and Lewes’s decision to be together was life-altering. In society’s eyes, their relationship was adultery because Lewes was technically married. By 1853, Mary Anne realized that Lewes was her soul mate. She’d been reading Feuerbach, whose ideas convinced her that marriage is not a legal arrangement but a moral arrangement. In this vein, she knew her relationship with Lewes was of a higher order than his marriage with his estranged wife. On July 20, 1854, Mary Anne and Lewes got on a ship for Europe and began their life together as a married couple. Their decision was an act of bravery and commitment.

Mary Anne and Lewes’s marriage fulfilled both of their lives. In London, however, Mary Anne was known as a homewrecker, and her family and friends disowned her. Despite this, the couple lived as traditional man and wife. Society’s reaction to their marriage helped them see society’s true colors. Ultimately, their love was worth the cost: they were exclusive, committed, and devoted to one another. For Mary Anne’s part, she could now approach life with confidence.

Lewes encouraged Mary Anne to write fiction. She hadn’t yet tried her hand at plots and dialogue, but she already had a talent for characterization. She started to write, showing Lewes her work at night. Lewes became her consultant, editor, and publisher. When she started publishing, she took the pseudonym George Eliot to hide her scandalous identity. When her true identity was discovered, Lewes protected her from the public by cutting out all criticism of her from the newspapers before they reached the masses.

Although Eliot’s masterpiece, Middlemarch, is mostly about unhappy marriages, Eliot and Lewes were happy together. However, they were not content with life as a whole: they both suffered from depression and illness and were restlessly compelled to improve themselves morally. As Eliot matured, her writing took on the fits of passion that she’d grown out of. She felt deeply and thought acutely, so she had to suffer through writing each book, bearing them like children.

Eliot’s books weren’t written for the purpose of making a point. Rather, they create worlds for readers to experience; she wrote about the everyday world and ordinary people. Her novels seem to suggest that a person thrives when they work within present reality or attend to a particular person, and not when they filter what is immediate through lofty or abstract ideas. After her self-centered childhood, she shows amazing sympathy in her novels. She writes about lack of sympathy and lack of communication as the worst moral flaws.

Eliot doesn’t believe in big, transformational change but in small, gradual change. She believes progress happens subtly through daily effort. Many of her monumental characters, such as Middlemarch’s Dorothea, have an ardent moral drive. Over time, they realize their goals are unrealistic and learn to focus their attention on small moral improvements instead. Eliot believes holiness isn’t otherworldly, but that it’s in the world at hand. Therefore, one has daily opportunities for self-sacrifice and service.

Eliot’s own life is a testimony of a person realizing that their moral ambitions are self-centered and lofty. She learned she could do good in the particular and mundane, such as in her marriage. The most significant event in her life was her relationship with George Lewes: it deepened and steadied her.