On a sunny summer’s day in 1857 you could have found George Eliot reading Jane Austen at Mont Orgueil

A SUNNY summer’s day in Gorey and a couple are walking together near the walls of the castle.

They are in love and they have moved away from London to travel and to avoid scandal at home, for he is married. But this is no ordinary couple and on this day in 1857 they are to add a golden moment to the Island’s literary heritage.

He is George Lewes, philosopher, academic and amateur zoologist, who spent some of his school days in Jersey, and she is Marian Evans, better known to the world as George Eliot, author of Middlemarch, Adam Bede and Mill on the Floss, but as yet unknown to the world.

In the shadow of the walls of Mont Orgueil, the pair sit down and, as they were accustomed to do, begin to read aloud from books they love – on this occasion on 5 June, it is from Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility.

Here at one of the Island’s most prominent monuments sits one of the greatest writers of the 19th century, reciting words written by another great English author from earlier in the same century. Remembered more for the people it imprisoned, the battles that were fought and for its glorious aspect, perhaps Mont Orgueil should also be cherished for hosting a golden moment from our literary past.

The moment is recorded faithfully by Lewes in his own journal and mentioned in a book entitled The Journals of George Eliot by George Eliot, Margaret Harris and Judith Johnson, published in 1998, Cambridge University Press.

The future George Eliot came to Jersey with Lewes on 15 May and stayed until 24 July. At first they stayed in St Helier, at Jeune’s Hotel in the Royal Square, where they described the accommodation as very comfortable. They walked to St Aubin to seek lodgings closer to the seashore but eventually opted for Gorey, for this was where Lewes could most easily indulge in his love of marine life study. There were no fishermen at St Aubin at that time, wrote Eliot.

Her thoughts on her time in Jersey are also referred to in a biography by Oscar Browning first published in 1890 by Walter Scott Publishing. ‘It was a sweet, beautiful life we led there,’ wrote Eliot.

While staying at Gorey, in the village at a property called Rose Cottage, courtesy of the Amy family, George Eliot continued to explore her latent abilities as a novelist and some of her time was devoted to writing Janet’s Repentance.

The story would appear in the series of short stories Scenes of a Clerical Life, her breakthrough work, the following year. By October she had begun work on the first of her major novels, Adam Bede, the idea for which had been nurtured in her mind for some months beforehand.

It would be rewarding to think that she might have come by some of her inspiration for the novel while she enjoyed a happy few months in Jersey, walking the lanes and seashore, and sitting with her lover reading aloud from the great literature of the past.

We have a few blue plaques in Jersey and maybe another one should be considered somewhere in the village or near the castle itself highlighting that brief sojourn by Eliot, for it would reflect a more peaceful era in the history of a fortification and a time when it surely inspired one of the giants of 19th century English literature.

• This is the first in a series by Mike Sunier inspired by books featuring Jersey or closely connected with the Island