in trust, the income to be administered by her brother, half-brother and the family solicitor. But it was in the tiny details that Evans’s will stung. The novels of Walter Scott, from which Mary Ann had read so tirelessly during the last few years of his life, were given to Fanny who, as far as we know, had no particular attachment to them. It was a small, cutting gesture, the only way Robert Evans knew to show Mary Ann that he had still not forgiven her for the holy war.
Robert Evans was buried next to his second wife in Chilvers Coton churchyard on 6 June 1849. Only six days later the Brays and Mary Ann set off for the Continent. Even in the midst of this double upheaval, Mary Ann’s old, impulsive ways reasserted themselves. Three months earlier she had reviewed James Anthony Froude’s novel The Nemesis of Faith for the Coventry Herald. The book was a particularly shocking example of ‘the crisis of faith’ novel and instantly became a cause célèbre. The tale of a clergyman who loses his faith and falls in love with a friend’s wife was sufficiently scandalous to get the book burned at Exeter College, Oxford, where Froude was, though not for much longer, a Fellow. Its publisher, John Chapman, who had also brought out the Strauss translation, sent a copy of The Nemesis of Faith to Mary Ann, who reviewed it rapturously in the Herald. Writing anonymously, as was usual at that time, she thrilled that ‘the books which carry this magic in them are the true products of genius’.22 She also wrote a complimentary note to Froude, coyly signing it ‘the translator of Strauss’. In an uncharacteristic burst of discretion, Chapman refused to divulge Mary Ann’s identity, so Froude was obliged to respond via the publisher. Guessing that the translator of Strauss had also written the Herald review in which he was described as a ‘fallen star’, Froude suggested flirtatiously that ‘she might help him to rise’. Receiving the letter in ‘high glee’, Mary Ann ran to Rosehill to show it to Cara, who reported herself ‘so pleased she should have this little episode in her dull life’.23 Mary Ann was in love again. It was now that she wrote to Sara teasingly representing herself as an unfaithful and aloof husband, giving her intoxication with Froude as the reason for her distraction. By this time she had read his previous book, Shadows of the Clouds, and declared herself in the grip of ‘a sort of palpitation that one hardly knows whether to call wretched or delightful’.24
The fallen star and the translator of Strauss finally met when Froude came to visit Rosehill in early June. The timing could not have been worse. Robert Evans had been buried the day before and Mary Ann was beside herself with grief. The burden of the past months and years had left her thin and pale. Still, when Bray suggested that Froude might like to join them on the Continental trip, he enthusiastically agreed. But then a strange thing happened. Four days later Charles, Cara and Mary Ann were in London, about to board the train to Folkestone, when John Chapman dashed up at the last minute with the decidedly odd message that Froude could not accompany them after all because he was about to be married.25
The most likely explanation behind this clumsy little drama is that Froude, despite finding Mary Ann less appealing in person than print, had decided that he would like to go abroad with the Brays. At this stage it looked as though the party would be larger, perhaps including Edward Noel and another old friend called Dawson. Over the next few days, when all the extra travellers had dropped out, Froude realised that he was being matchmade with Mary Ann.
Cara Bray might be in an unconventional marriage herself, but she was as keen as any of the Evanses to find Mary Ann a partner, especially now she was released from daughterly duties. Apart from anything, it would absolve the Brays from having her to live with them. It was one thing to have Mary Ann as a stimulating neighbour, quite another to live with her as a depressed and demanding member of the household. The only hitch in Cara’s scheme was that Froude did not have the slightest desire to marry Mary Ann. Panicked by the thought of spending the next few weeks pushed together with an over-ardent ageing spinster, he took the coward’s way out and sent his friend Chapman with the last-minute message. The fact that he chose to emphasise his engagement as the reason he could not travel is tellingly strange. Presumably he had been aware of it – he married Charlotte Grenfell only four months later – when he agreed to the trip. We do not know what passed between Mary Ann and Froude at their meeting a few days earlier, but it is clear that she had spent the previous dreary months building him up in her imagination. Did her pent-up need push her into reckless declarations of affection, just as it had with Dr Brabant? Did Froude find himself repelled by a clingy, ugly woman when he had been expecting a pretty girl with whom he might flirt for a few weeks on the way to the altar? Whatever the exact reason, the party which left for Folkestone consisted of only three.
As it turned out, it was probably just as well that Froude decided not to catch the train. Over the following weeks, as the party made its way through Calais, Paris, Avignon, Marseilles, Genoa and finally on to Geneva, Mary Ann emerged as a weepy and demanding travelling companion. Still laid low by grief, on several occasions during a fraught horseback journey through the Alps she was seized by hysterics, convinced that a broken side-saddle was about to pitch her into oblivion. Over a decade later, remembering with mortification just how tiresome she had been, she thanked Cara for her patience. ‘How wretched I was then – how peevish, how utterly morbid! And how kind and forbearing you were under the oppression of my company!’26
The year before, John Sibree’s decision to spend a year in Geneva after giving up the ministry had prompted Mary Ann into envious raptures: ‘O the bliss of having a very high attic in a romantic continental town, such as Geneva.’27 Now she decided to follow his example. For the first time in her life she had the time and just enough money to live how and where she pleased. Her father was dead and her siblings did not need her. She had been left £100 cash in her father’s will in lieu of some household items given to Chrissey and Fanny. If she was careful, she had enough to last the year. On 23 July she wrote to tell her half-sister Fanny of her plans: ‘The day after tomorrow I part from my friends and take up my abode at Geneva where I hope that rest and regular occupation will do more for my health and spirits than travelling has proved able to do.’28 Two days later, and quite probably breathing a sigh of relief, the Brays returned to Coventry, Mary Ann having been installed in a respectable pension in the centre of the town.
It is too easy to write up these Geneva months as a kind of heroic turning point in Mary Ann’s life, a breaking out of provincial spinsterhood into something brave and independent. John Cross certainly saw it like this, declaring that Geneva represented ‘a delightful, soothing change after … the monotonous dullness … of an English provincial town like Coventry, where there is little beauty of any sort to gladden the soul’.29 It would be good to imagine Mary Ann expanding in the bracing atmosphere of this most liberal of cities, transforming herself from provincial bluestocking into European intellectual. But much of the time she spent in Geneva was marked by loneliness, disappointment and the familiar frustrated longing for intimacy. She spent a lot of time holed up in her pension. And although she had French and German, this was not a passport to Swiss culture, which anyway turned out to be more stodgily bourgeois than anything she had experienced among the avant-garde of Coventry. Friendships formed with other tourists were fleeting and shallow, something which always unsettled her. Unable to stick it out for a year, she returned home after only eight months.
None the less, Geneva did represent a particular stage in Mary Ann’s creative development. It was now that her potential as a novelist emerged. Previously her published work consisted of erudite translation, workmanlike reviews and heavy-handed attempts at humorous essays. The letters she had written in Coventry had been lively and acute, but it was in the ones she sent from Geneva that the scope of her observant eye became clear. It was now, too, that she first started to write a journal, though unfortunately
