A devoted daughter.
As her friend said with loving pride, “She was the most devoted daughter for those nine years that it is possible to imagine.” Her father always spent three days in the week away from home; and those three days were Miss Evans’ holidays, given up to her work and her friends. But on the evenings he was at home, not the most tempting invitation in the world would induce her to leave him.
Her housekeeping.
“If I am to keep my father’s house, I am going to do it thoroughly,” she would say. And thoroughly she did try to do her duty, even to the matter of cooking on certain occasions. A friend recalls a visit one afternoon, when she found Marian in comical distress over her failures. The cook was ill, and Miss Evans undertook to manufacture a batter-pudding. “And when it came to table, it broke. To think that the mistress could not even make a batter-pudding!”
Rose G. Kingsley: ‘George Eliot’s County.’
Remarks on her connection with George Henry Lewes.
Not only was Mr. Lewes’ previous family life irretrievably spoiled, but his home had been wholly broken up for nearly two years. In forming a judgment on so momentous a question, it is, above all things, necessary to understand what was actually undertaken, what was actually achieved; and, in my opinion, this can best be arrived at, not from any outside statement or arguments, but by consideration of the whole tenor of the life which follows.
J. W. Cross: ‘George Eliot’s Life.’