Chapter two of Bodenheimer’s The Real Life of Mary Ann Evans is almost as fascinating as chapter one. In this chapter, Bodenheimer uses letter writing manuals and conduct books for ladies and a comparison between the young adult letters of Mary Ann Evans and Charlotte Brontë (only three years apart in age) to ultimately examine the manner in which George Eliot constructs the reader in her novels.

Letter writing was considered to belong to the realm of women. For women it was a way to keep in touch with friends and family after marriage had taken them away. It was also viewed as a domestic duty. Of course there were very strict rules on what constituted a proper letter. The rules were so strict because women writing letters was a dangerous thing.

Though women were exhorted to never say anything in a letter that could not be said in public or in mixed company–and of course these exhortations came with examples of women who were “ruined” from the imprudent use of their pens–letters were mainly private communications between two people. The privacy made men, especially husbands, very nervous at how their wives might represent them in letters.

Women were to write “improving” letters on a given topic so that they could practice organizing their thoughts–organized thought being such a difficult thing for women–and not waste paper and postage on trivial commonplaces and idle gossip. At the same time, however, women were not supposed to think of actually writing well. A concern for style was wicked and exhibited egotism, vanity, and ambition unbecoming to women.

Of course, women were supposed to have good handwriting too. Handwriting was equated with social virtue. The more neat and legible the writing, the more virtuous. Is it any surprise that both Brontë and Mary Ann Evans frequently apologized for their atrocious handwriting? But while Brontë was rather flippant in her apologies, confident that her friend would not mind, Mary Ann Evans is always worried about how her letters will look to her reader and generally couches her excuses in elaborate metaphors that both hide and reveal the truth.

What Bodenheimer finds most intriguing is how these two women, who both understood themselves to be living double lives, negotiated the “borderline activity” of letter writing conforming to and undermining the rules and codes of “epistolary discourse” and how this also appears in various ways in their fiction. I won’t go into the comparisons, you’ll have to read the book for that. Suffice it to say, however, that Bodenheimer’s analysis gives much to think about.

For Mary Ann Evans, what it comes down to is a worry that she will not be understood “without a complex mediation of her feelings in languages that others might be expected to read or hear.” Mary Ann Evans is both writer and reader of her letters, each sentence constructed not for the actual reader but for what she imagines the actual reader might think about what she had written. As a result, in her letters she creates elaborate constructions such as this one complaining about her domestic life:

I have lately led so unsettled a life and have been so desultory in my employments, that my mind, never of the most highly organized genus, is more than usually chaotic, or rather it is like a stratum of conglomerated fragments that shews here a jaw and rib of some ponderous quadruped, there a delicate alto-relievo of some fern-like plant, tiny shells, and mysterious nondescripts, encrusted and united with some unvaried and uninteresting but useful stone. My mind presents just such an assemblage of disjointed specimens of history, ancient and modern, scraps of poetry picked up from Shakespeare, Cowper, Wordsworth, and Milton, newspaper topics, morsels of Addison and Bacon, Latin verbs, geometry an entomology and chemistry, reviews and metaphysics, all arrested and petrified and smothered by the fast thickening every day accession of actual events, relative anxieties, and household cares and vexations.

Wow. If only my mind were so unorganized and geological!

Bodenheimer argues that the manner in which Mary Ann Evans sets herself in her letters as an imaginary reader mediating for the actual reader, carries over into the complex constructions of narrator and reader in George Eliot’s novels. “To be an actual reader, then is to be audience to George Eliot’s imaginary audiences; that is what her writing asks, and what it performs.” I have not read enough of George Eliot’s fiction to be able to agree or disagree with the argument. But it is an interesting one and it is making me wonder if a George Eliot binge might not be in my future.