DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln

Title

The Thirty-seventh George Eliot Memorial Lecture, 2008- George Eliot's Dorothea? 'That fair bright useful woman': Mrs. Nassau Senior in George Eliot's life and writing

Authors

Sybil Oldfield

Date of this Version

2009

Document Type

Article

Citation

The George Eliot Review 40 (2009)

Comments

Published by The George Eliot Review Online https://GeorgeEliotReview.org

Abstract

Who was Jeanie Senior before Octavia Hill introduced her to George Eliot in October 1866? Born Jeanie Hughes in 1828, the cherished daughter and only sister of seven brothers, she had started life as a happier Maggie Tulliver - keenly alive, with a questioning intelligence and an intense capacity for feeling. She could bum with indignation as well as overflow with impulsive generosity. Tall, golden haired and blue-eyed, she was also an exceptionally gifted musician with a marvellous singing voice, so it would have seemed that born into an affectionate, lively, well-to-do Squire's family, she had been allotted almost too many winning cards at the outset. But that charmed childhood had ended, catastrophically, at eighteen, when she lost the dearest of all her brothers, Walter, so like her that they were regarded as twins. In shock, and before she had met almost any other young men, she agreed six months later to marry Nassau, the son of her father's oldest friend, the eminent, 'iron law' political economist, Nassau William Senior. That marriage, she confessed twenty years later, was the 'one great disappointment in my life'. She, who had been born to do something to make the world better, found herself married to an idle, brief-less barrister who could not care less about the world - or more about his own creature comforts. She had to cope alone with bitter family bereavements, uterine cancer, constant money worries (her unemployed husband was actually disinherited) and the responsibility for her brother's four motherless children as well as for her own husband, son and widowed mother. She was a female Gulliver, painfully tied down in Lilliput by her every golden hair.

To make her life both bearable and meaningful, Jeanie Senior turned to music, to voluntary work and to friendship. In addition to her own eager concert-going, she would sing at distinguished private concerts, where she was saluted by the violinist Joachim as the greatest amateur singer of her time. He would ask to accompany her as she sang Beethoven or Schubert or Scottish folksongs. In contrast to that life of High Society and High Culture, her voluntary work had begun, as so often with Victorian women, as personal charity in her immediate neighbourhood, organizing street soup kitchens and visiting the local girls' industrial school and the workhouse infirmary. But that did not satisfy her. A radical Christian Socialist, like her brother Thomas Hughes, she had soon recognized that something much more systematic was needed. Therefore she became a pioneer unpaid social worker, an eager convert and helpmeet to Octavia Hill's project of regenerating inner city housing that was unfit for human habitation. Octavia Hill was not just an inspiring social activist, however, she was also an intimate younger friend, all the dearer for needing to be looked after by Jeanie Senior, lest she collapse from exhaustion. The way to Jeanie Senior's heart was to rouse her sympathy. Hence it is only partly surprising to read her letter to her schoolboy son Walter on 16 October 1866:

[Miss Hill] told me how deeply poor Mrs. Lewis [sic] feels her isolation from all women, for hardly any will go near her and no nice ones will know her. Miss Hill drew so touching a picture of the sadness and repentance [I] of Mrs. Lewis' life that I offered to go and see Mrs. Lewis if Miss Hill thought that a visit would be acceptable.