Prologue:
Bluestocking Passion

It was 6 October 1851. In London's Hyde Park, the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations was about to enter its final week. Already over 6 million visitors, twice the size of the population of London, had made the pilgrimage to the Crystal Palace to see what became known simply as the Great Exhibition, a spectacular series of towering glass pavilions in which Prince Albert had arranged for the wonders of Victorian invention, technology and industry to be showcased to the world.

But among the tourists teeming along Piccadilly that October afternoon, two Londoners had a different destination in mind. Unknown to each other and coming from different directions, they were both heading to William Jeff's bookshop in the Burlington Arcade.

Like much of Victorian London, the Burlington Arcade operated on two different levels. Along the ground floor were a variety of jewellers, gold and silversmiths and luxury boutiques selling gloves, silks, watches, perfume and handbags to the swelling ranks of London's wealthy shoppers, much as they do today. William Jeff's bookshop was halfway along at No. 15. Meanwhile, running along the first-floor gallery above the shops were a series of brothels that advertised their presence by hanging black stockings out of their windows. The boutiques on the ground floor made good sales from eager customers impulsively buying presents on their way upstairs.

Coming from her lodgings in The Strand and passing by Nelson's Column, the startling latest addition to the city skyline, Mary Ann Evans had recently arrived in London. At thirty, the same age as Queen Victoria, Mary Ann already had a formidable record of scholarly achievement. The major literary endeavour of her twenties had been the painstaking translation of a lengthy German academic treatise Das Leben Jesu by the philosopher David Strauss, in the course of which she had taught herself German, Greek, Latin and Hebrew. Determined to avoid being stuck in the Midlands, after her father died Mary Ann had packed her carpet-bag and left Coventry and her brother behind her in order to live an independent literary life in London. In the words of Henry James, Mary Ann was a 'bluestocking' - a female scholar, fierce and intelligent, who would soon be known as the best-read woman in London.

Coming across from his bohemian household in Bayswater was George Lewes, a freelance journalist who was always on the lookout for the next story. The illegitimate son of an obscure and itinerant poet and brought up partially in France, Lewes had gravitated to London, where he had tried his hand at various things - he had worked in a Russian trading house, he had toured with a troupe of actors when he had acted with Charles Dickens and played Shylock in The Merchant of Venice, he had written book reviews and miscellaneous articles for magazines and he had even published a novel. Lewes had been the first reviewer to spot the talent of a first-time author with the unusual name of Currer Bell, who had written a novel called Jane Eyre. Lewes had engaged in a long correspondence with Bell in which he advised him to improve his writing style by reading a slightly forgotten Regency author called Jane Austen, who had died some thirty-five years previously. Notoriously, Lewes was living in a commune with Thornton Hunt, his best friend and co-editor of The Leader, a periodical magazine. Hunt, who would go on to become the first editor of the Daily Telegraph and The Spectator, had already fathered one son with Lewes's wife Agnes. Lewes had happily adopted the baby along with his own sons, which would later have significant repercussions for any possible divorce proceedings. Short, heavily bearded with whiskers, long straggling hair and so invariably described as 'simian', Lewes was mercurial, extroverted, a dazzling raconteur and he loved a party. He was, wrote Jane Carlyle in 1849, 'the most amusing little fellow in the whole world - if you only overlook his unparalleled impudence, which is not impudence at all but man-of-genius bonhomie'.

Mary Ann Evans's powerful intellect coexisted with a rebellious and passionate streak. When she had first arrived in London and taken lodgings with John Chapman, the publisher of her translation The Life of Jesus, they had also become lovers. In a dramatic intervention, Chapman's wife Susanna and his existing mistress Elisabeth had joined forces to demand that he put an end to his affair with Mary Ann. Reluctantly he had done so, but she remained a lodger at his house at 142 The Strand and Chapman had just appointed her as deputy editor of the Westminster Review. It was Chapman who had walked with Mary Ann to the Burlington Arcade that October day, where he promptly recognised Lewes and made the introduction.

As between any freelance journalist and magazine editor, there would have been a frisson of interest. With his antennae finely tuned to detect whatever the next best article might be, Lewes would have been keen to bag a lucrative commission. Equally, Mary Ann would have been keen to impress on John Chapman that she could go toe to toe with a bright writer, no matter how brilliant or impudent his conversation.

While less immediately blatant than what was going on above them in the brothels upstairs, this meeting in William Jeff's bookshop between the 'bluestocking' and 'the most amusing little fellow in the whole world' clearly also had a powerful charge of physical attraction. Later that week, Mary Ann let slip to Charles Bray this brief and beguiling mention: 'I was introduced to Lewes the other day in Jeff's shop - a sort of miniature Mirabeau in appearance.'

The Comte de Mirabeau was a flamboyant figure from the French Revolution. Looking at Mirabeau's portrait today, it is difficult to fathom his appeal, yet he was infamous for his many scandalous love affairs. Despite Lewes's simian looks and straggly hair, Mary Ann Evans had identified in him the pull of a magnetic charisma and in herself, perhaps, the beginning of an attraction.

Lewes, for his part, had no doubt heard the gossip about John Chapman's and Mary Ann Evans's affair. Did he know enough to see this young, erudite editor in a different light? Did she suspect that he suspected? Would this meeting rip off the sticking plaster from her scholarly exterior, revealing the passionate radical beneath? Mary Ann's subsequent letters are coy about when she and Lewes started their affair, but since he was impulsive and she was a radical thinker who was prepared to blow away all social conventions, I do not think that they waited very long. At any rate, their lives were soon entangled. At first, it was a secret affair, conducted through the editing of articles and visits to the theatre and opera. While mentioning Thomas Carlyle and Robert Browning as possible contributors to the Westminster Review in her letter to Charles Bray of November 1851, Mary Ann includes the aside: 'Lewes says his article on Julia von Krudener will be glorious. He sat in the same box as us at The Merry Wives of Windsor and helped to carry off the dolorousness of the play.'

By 1854, the scholar from the Midlands threw caution to the winds. In a scene as exciting and passionate as any of the romantic novels which she would later satirise, Mary Ann and Lewes caught a cross-Channel steamer and fled to the Continent. Her journal takes up the story:

'I said a last farewell to Cambridge Street on 20th July 1854 and found myself on board the Ravensbourne, bound for Antwerp.'

Mary Ann was now committed. Living out the reality of the biggest gamble of her life, she arrived at St Katharine Docks before Lewes. Understandably she was anxious - might he have had second thoughts? Had he been able to say goodbye to his wife and children?

'I had 20 minutes of terrible fear least something should have delayed G. Before long I saw his welcome face looking for me over the porter's shoulder and all was well.'

All really was well. Clearly immune to the night chill, they sat out on the deck - presumably in each other's arms - and watched the dawn break over the Antwerp skyline. They were heading into uncharted territory and Mary Ann knew that their trip abroad would irrevocably change her life. Her journal entry catches the sublime excitement of the moment:

The day was glorious and our passage perfect. The sunset was lovely, but still lovelier the dawn as we were passing up the River Scheldt between two and three in the morning. The crescent moon, the stars, the first faint blush of the dawn reflected in the glassy river, the dark mass of clouds on the horizon which sent forth flashes of lightning.

Until this point Mary Ann's letters to her three Coventry friends, Sara Hennell, her sister Cara and Cara's husband Charles Bray, were generally long, wordy and discursive. Keen to impress upon them how...