DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln

Title

George Eliot Birthday Luncheon, 23 November 2008- The Toast to the Immortal Memory

Authors

John Rignall

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

I have attended several birthday luncheons over the years and I am very pleased and honoured to have been invited this year to propose the toast. The fact that this is a birthday celebration has prompted me to wonder how George Eliot herself was wont to celebrate her own birthday, and from the evidence of the letters and the journals the answer to my wondering question seems to be that she was not inclined to celebrate it at all. Indeed, she was barely inclined even to acknowledge it. There is a revealing early letter to Maria Lewis, written she claims between nine and ten in the evening of the 22nd of November 1839, which gives an earnest account of her attempts, amid distracting domestic chores, to improve herself intellectually and spiritually through assiduous reading. It ends with a solemn wish to do better, and then after signing off, she adds a lapidary postscript: 'Today is my twentieth birthday' (Letters, I, 35). The birthday is an afterthought, not the main feature of the day. No cakes or parties, it seems, for the serious-minded young Mary Ann: and this appears to have remained the case even when she had begun to cast off the evangelical earnestness of her early years. Three years later on the 23rd of November 1842 she informs her new friend Sara Hennell that 'My birthday (the 23rd) I celebrated yesterday much, I fancy, as the oysters on the rock celebrate theirs' (Letters, I, 152). These solitary oysters are certainly not those that are traditionally accompanied by champagne.

Now Sara Hennell, whose birthday was on the day after Marian's, the 23rd of November, is the one person to whom she did acknowledge her birthday, and the one person who always faithfully remembered it. The two friends maintained an exchange of affectionate letters around the dates of their contiguous birthdays even after their lives and opinions had grown completely apart. Indeed, they kept it up for the rest of the writer's life (Sara, who was seven years older, outlived her by nearly two decades). Initially at least, it seems to have been Sara who was the more conscientious observer of the anniversary. In 1856 she sent Marian a portrait of herself as a present, which prompted the following response in a letter of the 22nd of November: 'Do you know, I had never thought of our birthdays! I have such an unanniversary keeping mind' (Letters, 11, 276). And ten years later she demonstrates the truth of that self-description in another letter on her birthday to Sara:

For a wonder, I remembered the day of the month and felt a delightful confidence that I should have a letter from her who always remembers such things at the right moment. You will hardly believe in my imbecility - I can never be quite sure whether your birthday is the 21st or 23rd and Charlie's, is the 23rd or 24th. (Letters, IV, 314)