EF Benson socialite writer

Edward Frederick Benson (Fred) was the son of Edward Benson, Archbishop of Canterbury, and a prominent figure in the Victorian Church of England. His parents had 6 children, all of whom seem to have been eccentric but talented. None of them married, or had children, and some had mental health issues. Fred was different to his very serious father, wanting to be a writer and a society figure. He was highly intelligent and his first novel, Dodo, was an instant success. It was a comic satirical novel, loosely based on the well-known socialite Margot Tennant, who married Henry Asquith, the Prime Minister. He was a prolific writer, but enjoyed society life. He also wrote ghost stories and children’s fiction and biographies. But his most famous works were his light novels about "Lucia" Lucas, a middle aged widow, of genteel birth, who dabbles in the arts, and wants to be the social "Queen Bee" of her little town Tilling. Tilling is based on Rye, where Benson was Mayor....Fred was gay but not much is known about this. He fell in love with men during his life. In the “Lucia” books, there are some sly references to homosexuality… “Quaint” Irene, an artist, dresses in men’s clothes and acts like a boy. George Pillson, who marries Lucia, is an effete effeminate man who dabbles in the arts, as does his wife... and is dominated by her. The plots revolve around social one upmanship in the town, with Lucia battling with Elizabeth Mapp, a spinster lady who was the “Queen Bee” of the town’s social circle before Lucia’s arrival. Lucia pretends to be much more proficient at music than she really is, and pretends to be able to speak Italian fluently. She uses baby talk to appear "cute." It is said that Lucia is based a bit on the rather bizarre novelist, Marie Correlli, who also pretended to be more learned than she really was, who showed off a good deal but was very naive and silly. Elizabeth Mapp outflanks her, by getting married, in middle age to Major Benjy, and pretending to be pregnant. Lucia is furious at this. She then marries Georgie, restoring her ascendancy, but it is an unconsummated marriage. She is not interested in sex, though she and Georgie enjoy each other’s company and love each other as friends. Lucia’s main interest is in social power. Benson spent many years in Rye, where there was an artistic community and he lived in Lamb House, which had belonged to Henry James. He died aged 72 in the early part of World War II.

George Eliot Part IV

Marian’s work was admired as serious fiction, and when her identity became known, there was an increasing tolerance of her situation. Mrs Gaskell wrote to her and said that she wished that she really WAS Mrs Lewes…. but she admired her fellow novelist’s work. (However as a proper Victorian and a minister's wife she could not tolerate Marian's transgression). Princess Louise, the most liberal minded of the Royal Family, who had artistic tastes and friends, visited her. Marian’s masterpiece is Middlemarch, a novel of “provincial life”, set mainly in the Midlands. Victorian fiction had developed greatly since the days of Jane Austen. Austen's works were comedies of manners, set in a stable world of the upper and upper middle classes, with the main focus on the romance of the hero and heroine. There were a few middle class merchants in her books but there was nothing about their work. Victorian fiction tended to be much longer and to cover a very wide canvas. Gaskell, like Eliot - wrote about the social changes that had taken place in England over the years since the Regency. She covered events such as the coming of the railways, which improved and speeded up transport and mobility, the development of medicine and surgery, industrialisation. She also wrote about religious conflicts and problems. Trollope’s novels were set in the world of politics and the higher echelons of the Church of England, but Eliot went further, writing about Methodism and other Dissenting churches… as in Silas Marner. She did have nostalgia for the old fashioned England of her childhood, which was disappearing as the country became industrialised, people moved into cities... New social problems of poverty and slums came into being. In Silas Marner, she set it in the years of the Regency. She was still critical of the upper classes, yet she also seemed to prefer the rural life of Raveloe, where Silas lives -working as a home based weaver, together with his foster child Eppie. She sees it as healthier and more decent than the life in towns and cities where people worked in factories. In spite of her radical views in some respects, she had a deeply conservative streak in her nature... which tended to romanticise the older rural England. Eliot’s novels were more about a whole society than the “romantic couple”, such as Austen wrote about. In Middlemarch, the heroine, Dorothea, marries in the early part of the book... Her marriage is a mistake, caused by her naïve belief that Casaubon, her husband is a “great soul” and an intellectual... who can give her life a meaning. She comes to realise that he is not as learned or intelligent as he believes, and that his work is already outdated...and meaningless. Tertius Lydgate, a radical minded, reformist doctor and the main male character, marries Rosamond Vincy, a lightweight, silly butterfly female of the kind that Eliot seems to have disliked. His marriage is also an unhappy one and unlike Dorothea, he is not released from it to make a happier one. This sort of “slice of life” novel, which studies marriage in detail and does not end at the altar, was typical of Victorian fiction. Middlemarch is a study of marriage, as well as of courtship. Some of the plot also revolves around political action, church issues, and Lydgate’s attempts to reform medical practices in the town. (He finally has to give in to his wife, give up his research and become a fashionable practitioner). Eliot did a lot of studying on scientific and political issues, to write the book. In some of her works, such as Romola, the heavy duty studying tends to result in the book’s feeling overly researched, rather than natural. However in Middlemarch, she gets the balance right. As Eliot became more respectable and accepted in society - she grew a bit more conservative in her views. She and Lewes were a happy couple and she was devastated when he died. Her own health was failing and she was very grieved. Then, to everyone's surprise, 18 months after his death, she married a younger man called Johnnie Cross, who had been a close friend of hers and Lewes'. He regarded her as an aunt and loved her, and she was lonely and looking for a new partner. Strangely on their honeymoon in Italy, he caused a scandal by jumping into a canal, presumably with the intention of killing himself. He was fished out and recovered gradually from his nervous breakdown. But it seemed as if he found the reality of being actually married to a woman who was so much older and cleverer than he was, and whom he had regarded as an aunt or mother, shocked him and he wanted to get out of it. Eliot's health grew worse and in December 1880, not long after her marriage, she died. She had been pleased that her brother Isaac - who had broken off relations with her, after she had become Lewes' mistress, had congratulated her on her marriage as she was now a respectable woman again.

George Eliot (Marian Evans)

Marian used a pen name for a few reasons. One was that she wanted to use a masculine name. Women novelists, while there were many of them, were often thought of poorly, by serious critics. She had herself written a critical article entitled “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists”, decrying the “Silver Fork” genre. This was very popular at the time. These novels were a picture of “high life’ among the glamorous upper classes... Rather like the sillier sort of costume dramas nowadays. Since Marian thought of herself as much better educated and capable of writing more intelligent fiction...she didn’t want to be classed with the silly lady novelists. Another reason was her ambiguous status. Many people thought of her as a “bad woman”, because of her living with Lewes openly. Marian Evans thought of herself as a very serious and highly moral woman. She believed that her relationship with Lewes was equivalent to a marriage, and she herself did not believe in casual affairs. She assumed the role of “mother” to his sons by his wife, and felt that she could justify her behaviour as regards getting involved with him. She said that there were women who engaged in liaisons, within the confines of respectable marriage, which helped to cover their infidelities... These women were accepted in society -but she was not interested in that sort of life. Her novels were very much “moral” ones where sin was punished for the most part. In particular, she was strict with her female characters. Some critics have complained that although she herself broke with many conventions and led a very independent life, she didn’t allow any of her women characters to do anything like that. In “Adam Bede”, the heroine, Dinah starts out as a Methodist woman preacher, but when she marries and the Methodists decide that women should not be allowed to preach, she conforms. Another example is Dorothea Brooke, the heroine of Middlemarch. She is intelligent but very naive, and makes an unhappy marriage to a dry and dull clergyman. She finds that he is narrow minded, not very intelligent and incapable of warmth. In her next marriage, she chooses a young man, Will Ladislaw, who goes into parliament as a reformer. We are told that she found fulfilment in being a helper to him, supporting him in his work - in short subsuming her life in his. It’s very different to the way that Marian’s partner, Lewes, supported her, helped her get published, encouraged her to write and protected her from bad reviews etc. Even during her lifetime, many women writers who knew Marian -women who were single or widowed and who wrote for a living- were irritated at the “goddess” airs they felt that she assumed and at how her partner protected and supported her greatly. They often had to write hard and fast to provide for children or other impoverished relatives, and could not spend years researching. It’s probable that her intellectual snobbery alienated many people almost as much as her “being an immoral woman” in a sexual sense, did. Because of her ambiguous status, not many women at first would visit her. However she was devoted to her work, and she was able to receive male friends.. As time passed and her novels became highly admired and respected, she did become more socially acceptable and had a salon of male and female visitors.

George Eliot Part II

After the trip to Switzerland, Marian came back to London and began to seek work as a writer and journalist. It was very unusual work for a woman but she was highly intelligent, well read and educated. She moved into the home of Chapman - a radical publisher… and began to write. She supported revolution in Europe as did most radicals of the time, but in England, she favoured gradual reform. She fell in love with Chapman, but he already had a wife and a mistress and wasn’t interested. The wife and mistress combined forces to get her out of the house. She wrote for the Westminster Review and continued her reading and studies. Then she fell in love with George Lewes, a novelist and journalist... who was also married. He and his wife Agnes had agreed to an open marriage. However over time, Agnes had become very seriously involved with Thornton Leigh Hunt. He was a newspaper editor and the son of the famous literary critic, Leigh Hunt. Lewes found he could not tolerate the affair. Agnes had had 3 children by her lover, and because Lewes had initially accepted her adultery, he was unable to get a divorce. So Marian and Lewes were not able to marry. It was a sacrifice for her, to have to settle for being his mistress, but they decided to live together. They treated each other as husband and wife. Literary men and upper class men had traditionally had mistresses but they usually did not live with them publicly or treat them as if they were married..Lewes was devoted to her and more supportive than many men would have been. He encouraged her to write fiction. She was in her late 30's when she wrote her first novel….She published it anonymously… then wrote another novel, Adam Bede, with the pen name George Eliot…Adam Bede was a great success and was enjoyed even by the queen….

George Eliot Part I

George Eliot is not one of my favourite novelists. I like her best novel, Middlemarch.. but generally I find her work has a very heavy quality… overly moralistic and rather dull. I have never much liked her as a person either. She seems to have been an uneasy combination of a woman who was insecure and over sensitive, but also very egoistical. She was born in Nuneaton – in the Midlands of England, in 1819. Her father was Robert Evans, who was an estate manager to a landed family. Her family were comfortably off, but not rich or upper class. She was named Mary Ann, which became Marian or sometimes Pollyann. She was devoted to her father, who was a very conservative, old fashioned man. However, his daughter was not very beautiful. He gave her a good education since her chances of marriage seemed slim. She was sent to a school where the prevailing atmosphere was Low Church Evangelical Anglican and she became very religious. She also had access to her father’s employer’s library and read a a lot. At 16, she left school to keep house for her father. At 21, she and Robert Evans moved to Coventry, where she came under the influence of more liberal thinkers. She began to doubt the literal truth of the bible and to lose her religious belief, which had been very important to her. Her father was very angry with her over this, and they quarrelled. However to placate him, she went on attending church and keeping house. She continued her studies especially about religious issues... studying the new Bible Criticism. When she was 30, her father died and she was free to pursue her intellectual interests, and to become a free thinker. The first thing she did was to travel to Switzerland, with her friends the Brays, who were the lynch pin of her group of intellectual friends in Coventry.

Desiree Clary Part II

Desiree then moved to Rome, with her sister Julie and Julie’s husband, Joseph Bonaparte. She became engaged to Leonard Duphot, a French soldier, also from Lyons, but he was killed. She returned to France and received another proposal from General Junot, one of Napoleon’s friends. The Bonaparte family had liked her, and disliked Josephine. Desiree did not like Josephine either, but was polite to her… unlike some of the Bonapartes. Then in 1798, she married Jean Charles Bernadotte, another French soldier and one of the Bonaparte circle. In 1799, she gave birth to their only child, a son called Oscar. The name was suggested by Napoleon, because he liked the Ossianic poetry of McPherson. Oscar was the name of Ossian’s son… Napoleon retained some affection for her, but at times used her to keep an eye on Bernadotte, whom he suspected of being overly ambitious. Desiree was a simple not very clever woman who enjoyed private life and was not interested in politics or high society. However, her marriage to one of the Napoleonic marshals meant that she had to engage in social activities when she would have preferred to spend her time with her own family. Bernadotte’s ambitious nature meant that he took up military and political postings which kept him away from Paris and his wife. In 1810 however, Bernadotte was offered the chance to become heir to the throne of Sweden. He was eager to take this up but Desiree did not want to live away from Paris. In later years, however, she had to move to Sweden, as Crown Princess and later as queen.

Desiree Clary Napoleon’s first fiancée

Desiree was born Eugenie Bernadine Clary in 1777 to a well to do middle-class family in Lyons. She and Napoleon became engaged…when he was a young army officer. He was fond of her and wanted a wife with a dowry. His brother Joseph had married Desiree’s older sister Julie… Desiree had been named Eugenie, but it seems that Napoleon suggested the new name to her. However her father was not so keen on allowing the engagement. M. Clary is reputed to have said that one Bonaparte in the family was enough. The young couple were informally engaged, but Napoleon was extremely ambitious. He was intelligent, ruthless and hardworking and determined to get on. The Revolution gave opportunities for ambitious middle class men and low ranking impoverished nobles to rise much higher than they would have under the old regime. The new republic was at war, and the young Bonaparte became a general very young. However in 1795, he refused a command which he regarded as a demotion, and his career prospects declined. Then he became famous for putting down a Royalist rebellion. He met Josephine de Beauharnais, a socialite and the mistress of Paul Barras, one of the virtual rulers of France. Napoleon fell madly in love with her. She was elegant and charming, and while far from rich, she had influential friends. But Napoleon was fascinated by her sophistication, her charm and attractive looks. He jilted Desiree, who was far simpler and less sophisticated than his new love... and he married Josephine… But Fate had other plans for Desiree Clary.