George Eliot: The Last Victorian. Kathryn Hughes

more stodgily bourgeois than anything she had experienced among the avant-garde of Coventry. Friendships formed with other tourists were fleeting and shallow, something which always unsettled her. Unable to stick it out for a year, she returned home after only eight months.

      None the less, Geneva did represent a particular stage in Mary Ann’s creative development. It was now that her potential as a novelist emerged. Previously her published work consisted of erudite translation, workmanlike reviews and heavy-handed attempts at humorous essays. The letters she had written in Coventry had been lively and acute, but it was in the ones she sent from Geneva that the scope of her observant eye became clear. It was now, too, that she first started to write a journal, though unfortunately the first part of it, covering 1849–54, was destroyed by John Cross, anxious to eliminate evidence of her bumpy emotional life before she settled into unwedded commitment with G. H. Lewes. But if there is no journal account of her time in Geneva, we do still have a clutch of long, vivid letters describing the shabby genteel atmosphere of life in a Swiss boarding-house.

      The recent revolutions in France and Italy had resulted in a flow of well-heeled refugees into tolerant Geneva. Not yet permanently exiled, they hovered within striking distance of their homes, waiting to see how the political dust would settle. The Campagne Plongeon, where Mary Ann was staying, contained some of these stateless gentlefolk, including the Marquis de St Germain and his extended family, who were temporarily unable to return to their native Piedmont because of their association with the discredited regime.

      It was not just the politically dispossessed who found refuge at Campagne Plongeon. There were two sad Englishwomen in residence, both cut off from their family and cultural roots. The Baronne de Ludwigsdorf was a refined woman who spoke perfect French and German, and reminded Mary Ann of Cara. She also had minimal self-esteem, declaring that, while she would like to be Mary Ann’s friend, ‘she does not mean to attach herself to me, because I shall never like her long’.³⁰

      The reasons for the other Englishwoman’s dislocation were more straightforward. Mrs Lock ‘has had very bitter trials which seem to be driving her more and more aloof from society,’³¹ reported Mary Ann. In the gossipy atmosphere of the pension, the details soon emerged. Apparently Mrs Lock’s daughter had married a French aristocrat by whom she had two daughters. But the previous year the young woman had run off with her husband’s cousin. Mrs Lock was so ashamed that she felt obliged to stay away from her old life in England. ‘No one likes her here,’ explained Mary Ann bluntly, ‘simply because her manners are brusque and her French incomprehensible.’³²

      The third category comprised tourists. There were an American mother and daughter. The former was ‘kind but silly – the daughter silly, but not kind, and they both of them chatter the most execrable French with amazing volubility and self-complacency’.³³ European visitors tended to be more cultured. Mary Ann was mildly pleased to meet Wilhelm von Herder, grandson of the philosopher, who took her boating and from whom she purloined a copy of Louis Blanc’s Histoire de dix ans, 1830–1840.

      Hurt by the lack of letters from home, Mary Ann turned to this ragbag crew for comfort. Recently orphaned, her need for surrogate parenting was more intense than ever and she worked hard to turn each of the middle-aged female guests into a surrogate mother. Of course, her letters to Cara and Charles were designed to let them know just how well she was doing without them. None the less, she does genuinely seem to have become a favourite in the Campagne Plongeon community. The Marquise de St Germain, for instance, declared that she loved her and fiddled with her hair, making ‘two things stick out on each side of my head like those on the head of the Sphinx’.³⁴ The Baronne de Ludwigsdorf was ‘a charming creature – so anxious to see me comfortably settled – petting me in all sorts of ways. She sends me tea when I wake in the morning, orangeflower water when I go to bed, grapes, and her maid to wait on me.’³⁵ Madame de Vallière, who ran the pension and was herself a political exile, is described as ‘quite a sufficient mother’.³⁶ Even the brusque and unpopular Mrs Lock turns out, in that insistently repeated word, to be ‘quite a mother’,³⁷ fussing over Mary Ann and making sure she had people to talk to at dinner.

      In return Mary Ann offered these women something which was unique in the disappointed, self-absorbed atmosphere of the pension – an empathic listening ear. Charles Bray had been the first to identify the girl’s ability to set her own concerns temporarily on one side, while she absorbed the truth of another. Now she developed the capacity even further, drawing confidences out of people who were long used to hugging their unhappiness to themselves. Baronne de Ludwigsdorf, for instance, ‘has told me her troubles and her feelings, she says, in spite of herself – for she has never been able before in her life to say so much even to her old friends’.³⁸