The brother and sister who, like Tom and Maggie, had once "roamed the daisied fields together" in loving childhood, would never meet again. This silence was to stretch bleakly over the coming quarter of a century. Even more hurtfully, he had instructed their sister to break off contact too. Ever since she had written to Isaac Evans three years before to explain that she was now cohabiting in London with the married Lewes – "Mrs Lewes" was a term of social convenience, her legal name remained Mary Ann Evans – the rigidly respectable Isaac had refused to have anything to do with her. More than mere melodrama, the watery hug represented a wishful reworking of Eliot's fractured relationship with her own adored brother, with whom she had grown up on the Warwickshire family farm in the 1820s.
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