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Agnes Lewes (née Jervis; 1822-1902)

In 1841, he married Agnes Jervis, daughter of Swynfen Stevens Jervis.

1841 GHL marries Agnes Jervis, eldest daughter of Swynfen Jervis, 18 February at St Margaret’s Church, Westminster. She is 18 years old. They live with Mrs Willim at 3 Pembroke Square, Kensington. GHL writes an article on Shelley in the Westminster Review, April. Agnes gives birth to a daughter 22 December, who dies 24 December.

The marriage of George Lewes and Agnes Jervis, contracted in 1841, had been fruitful and harmonious for some years. Agnes entertained, undertook some literary tasks on her own account, and bore five children, two of whom died in infancy. In the early 1850s, Agnes took up with their friend and Lewes’s partner in publishing ventures, Thornton Hunt, and though the Leweses continued to live together until 1852, Agnes had a son and three daughters to Hunt between 1850 and 1857. Because Lewes allowed these children to be registered as his, he was held to have condoned his wife’s adultery, and divorce was impossible. After the breakdown of the marriage, GHL continued to take financial and eventually custodial responsibility for the three surviving sons, whose presence and prospects figure increasingly in GE’s journal from the late 1850s.

George himself did quite well in marrying Agnes Jervis, the beautiful daughter of Swynfen Jervis who in 1837 was M.P. for Bridport, Staffordshire. In the early years of their marriage her inheritance helped eke out his literary earnings... on February 18, 1841, and their marriage seemed to thrive on the libertarian ideals and life-style of the circle in which they moved. His wife, Agnes Jervis had three children with George Lewes and four with another man. However, George had allowed himself to be named as father on the birth certificates of the illegitimate children. This meant he couldn’t divorce his wife because he was considered compliant in the adultery and so wasn’t free to marry. "Indeed, round about the mid-century there begins to be perceptible a certain cooling off in Lewes's radical ardour. He had accepted - once - that there should be nothing to complain of in being made a mari complaisant, but the point came when he had had enough of being liberated. Thornton continued to satisfy the sexual demands both of Kate Gliddon and Agnes Jervis, and on October 21 1851 Agnes produced a sister. Rose Agnes, to team up alongside Edmund Alfred. Again Lewes accepted that the infant's surname should be his, but felt that one performance in the role of cuckold was enough. He separated himself from his 'four boys and a human Rose in the shape of their mother' ."He married another free spirit, Agnes Jervis. They had five children. Meanwhile Lewes developed a close friendship with a journalist named Hunt. When Agnes had four more children by Hunt, Lewes accepted their paternity. Lewes was meanwhile taking up a long affair with writer Marian Evans who wrote as George Eliot. It was, to say the least, a very odd skein of relationships. "There may have been some personal reasons for Lewes’s view of women. The Leader was not the only possession he held in common with Hunt. The other was Mrs Lewes. Like his hero Shelley, Lewes proclaimed his belief in free love and open marriage, and like Shelley found the practice less wonderful than the theory. He married young, at 24, the 18-year-old sister of some boys to whom he acted briefly as tutor. Agnes was well-educated, charming, and so pretty that she was sometimes called Rose for the brightness of her complexion. Her father, Swynfen Jervis, was a country gentleman, a Radical MP and scholar; both Dante Gabriel and Christina Rossetti knew the family, where their father had also been a tutor. Agnes was the eldest child; she lost her mother young and had two stepmothers. Rossetti, a boy of 12 when he knew her, admired her looks and her good nature; she was also musical, and knew German, and in the early days of her marriage was able to help Lewes with his journalism...Agnes herself was cut out of her own father’s will...Her most surprising story is of how, in December 1938, a biographer of George Eliot received a letter from an old lady of 85, Ethel Welsh, née Lewes, confidently asserting that she was the daughter of George Henry Lewes by his wife Agnes, and that any suggestion that her mother had behaved improperly was false: ‘My Mother was a most perfect Mother.’ Ethel had also loved her supposed father very much. ‘All children liked him,’ she wrote, and offered no explanation for his disappearance from the scene when she was four. The implication of her remarks is that George Eliot stole away Ethel’s father from his happy family, which we know to be untrue. Can Ethel really have believed what she wrote, or was she offering the version she thought proper and loyal? Nobody knows what Agnes, the perfect mother, thought about anything, though she outlived her lover and his wife, her husband, her husband’s mistress and several of her own children. The only photograph we have of her, taken in her late sixties, in a lacecap, suggests a once pretty woman, grown comfortably stout, and placid. She died in 1902,aged 80. Perhaps she was a woman of sensations rather than thoughts."His marriage to Agnes Jervis (1822-1902) was in its openness, its taking a triangular shape to include Lewes's friend Thornton Hunt, by whom Agnes had four children between 1850 and 1857, distinctly unconventional.

Lewes was unable to procure a divorce from his wife, Agnes Jervis, because he had countenanced her adultery and agreed to represent himself, on birth certificates, as the father of several of the children that she had had with other men. In the eyes of the law, he thus forfeited his legal right to end the marriage. The price that he and Eliot paid for such open-mindedness was considerable, especially when Adam Bede made her a literary celebrity.

Her affair with Hunt continued, and between 1850 and 1857 she bore him four children. Every one of these was registered under the name of Lewes—apparently with the consent of the husband-in-absentia as well as the lover and, presumably, the father of them all. Her whole history is somewhat obscure, but  Agnes Jervis Lewes might appear to have succeeded in escaping the common fate, common at least in art and fiction, of the “fallen woman”; that is, she apparently succeeded in having lover and husband, too, along with a family—as Mary Ellen Meredith had not done. Unlike the unconventional and tragic Mary Ellen, the unconventional and complacent Agnes had a long, long life. She died in 1902, supported to the end of her days by a legacy from Lewes.

I am glad to hear for the first time a favouring account of Mrs Lewes. She is a reminiscence of my earliest years, when I (a boy of 10 or so) knew her (a very handsome good-natured girl of some 17 or 18 I suppose) in the house of her father, Swynfen Jervis M.P. a radical member of those days and a very cultivated scholar. I remember Lewes also as tutor in the house. I still have a hapless recollection of my perturbed state of bashfulness when Agnes Jervis goodnaturedly tried to make me dance with her. I never could believe that she was likely to be quite in the wrong, when her husband was such a horrid fellow as I always thought Lewes. Why he shd have left her, doubtless still young and handsome, it is nevertheless difficult to understand. Of course you know the report was that she took up with the only man to be found who was uglier than Lewes—viz Thornton Hunt, whatever may be the case, my remembrances of her assure me that she is a good soul.

Lewes had been tutor in the Jervis family, and Gabriele Rossetti had given instruction in Italian there. Christina had stayed with them, and Rossetti made an imaginary sketch of her taking dictation from Swynfen Jervis who was something of a poet.

He and his wife, Agnes Jervis, were followers of Shelley’s ideas on free love (a year later Lewes would condone Agnes’ decision to take his best friend, Thornton Hunt, as lover).

'Two of the sons died in their father's lifetime. The eldest, Charles, became the heir of "George Eliot" and died in 1891... [Agnes was] probably the last survivor of a brilliant group amongst whom her lot was cast 50 years ago.'