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George Eliot's first fiction was The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton, the first in the series of Scenes of Clerical Life. Two further “scenes” followed, each questioning the nature of legally and socially sanctioned Anglican married life and highlighting the occurrence of marital abuse under cover of respectable marriage, on the one hand, and true love on the other. Janet, the central character in Janet's Repentence, the second of the series, has:
a sweet, playful, rather childlike disposition and is artlessly beautiful. … But there are bruises under her clothes and her face is worn by heart-piercing griefs. At night she drinks and weeps and wildly wishes herself dead; each morning she is hungover and ashamed. (p. 54)
Eventually, Dempster, her violent and abusive husband, in a rage, casts Janet out of the house. She has thoughts of leaving him, but he controls her property, and she feels “too crushed, too faulty, too liable to reproach to seek legal redress. The marriage also has a moral hold on her” (p. 54).
Eliot's solution is to kill Dempster off, which means Janet is financially independent. The realist in Eliot, however, cannot rely on plot devices. Instead, Janet's struggles in marriage makes her question conventional judgements about right and wrong. Her outwardly respectable marriage had been brutal, containing much that could be judged sinful. Janet forms a friendship with Mr Tryan, demonstrating “wifely devotion” towards him that “no one could feel she was performing anything but a sacred office”. They fall in love and he and Janet share “a sacred kiss of promise” before he dies of tuberculosis.
Eliot was born Mary Anne Evans in 1819. Having experienced disappointments in love, she “eloped” to Berlin in 1854 with George Henry Lewes, journalist, scientist, and married father. This was three years before the publication of Scenes of Clerical Life. Her brother's sharp rebuke was to cast her out of the family by turning his back on her and instructing her