Word: marianism
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Virginia Lewis' start was much like another Philadelphia Negro's, Contralto Marian Anderson. Soprano Lewis, discovered six years ago by Contralto Anderson's accompanist, studied as best she could, earned her living as a housemaid, went on relief, finally got a WPA music-teaching job last February. One day her voice was exhibited to Samuel Rosenbaum, president of the Robin Hood Dell concerts. Mr. Rosenbaum, after launching Soprano Lewis in the Dell, vowed to get her what he called "visibility" at the White House. He got it through Pennsylvania's Senator Guffey's sister Emma...
Mary Ann (later Marian) Evans (later George Eliot) was one of the homeliest women who ever wrote a first-rate English novel. She was also one of the most affectionate. For many years she looked for a man who would prefer character to beauty and in Publisher John Chapman she thought she had found him. This episode, overlooked by John W. Cross in his official Life of George Eliot, was resuscitated last fortnight to the delight of literary gossips when Chapman's diaries were published with a lively, 119-page introduction by Gordon S. Haight...
...assist him in editing the Review, Chapman shrewdly imported Marian Evans from the country, installed her in his home as a boarder. She was not the first. Marian soon discovered that Chapman made a practice of renting room's to women who could distract him mentally while their board contributed to the upkeep of his publishing business. Marian had been preceded by the authoress of a learned novel on ancient Egypt who was known to her enemies as Miss Sennacherib. Co-boarding with Miss Sennacherib was Miss Tilley, who acted as the mistress of Chapman and the governess...
Whether or not Marian was a platonic boarder, Author Haight does not say. In any case, she remained for two years of weekly soirees, got to know nearly everybody worth knowing among Victorian advanced thinkers. Among them were Herbert Spencer, Carlyle, Harriet Martineau, Francis Newman...
...this worldly environment, young Marian Evans had long feared that she might become "earthly, sensual and devilish." She wrote little but translations, but even these were a moral hazard: she had lost her faith while translating Strauss's Life of Jesus. She was about to lose something else. Says Author Haight: "The sensual side seems to have developed to a marked degree while she was translating The Essence of Christianity." From this work Marian learned Philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach's notions about free love. She had met "the ugliest man in London," George Lewes, the biographer of Goethe...