George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) had multiple personality: She, herself, said she had “double consciousness,” a nineteenth century term for multiple personality.

“Eliot used the term ‘double consciousness’ of herself on at least two occasions. In her journal account of her visit to Italy in 1860 she wrote that ‘One great deduction to me from the delight of seeing world-famous objects is the frequent double consciousness which tells me that I am not enjoying the actual vision enough…’ Herbert Spencer noted that she once told him she was ‘troubled by double consciousness—a current of self-criticism being an habitual accompaniment of anything she was saying or doing…’ “ (1, pp. 94-95).

“double consciousness: a semi-technical term in this period. Physiologists of mind, including Sir Henry Holland (1788-1873), who was to become Eliot and Lewes’s friend and occasional consultant physician, hypothesized that the hemispheric structure of the brain had observable consequences for perception. Health of mind depended upon the ‘proper correspondence, or unity of action’ of the two halves of the brain and nervous system…Sufferers from mental derangement and, in some cases, hysteria were particularly likely to experience ‘a sort of double-dealing’ of mind with itself: ‘there appear, as it were, two minds; one tending to correct…the other…’ These states, ‘where the mind passes by alternation from one state to another, each having the perception of external impressions and appropriate trains of thought, but not linked together by the ordinary gradations, or by mutual memory’ were called ‘double consciousness’…Other mid-century writers, including John Addington Symonds, interpreted double consciousness as an associative disorder rather than looking to the structure of the brain for an explanation…” (1, p. 94).

Search “double consciousness” in this blog for a more extensive discussion of the concept.

1. George Eliot. The Lifted Veil and Brother Jacob. Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Helen Small. Oxford University Press, 1999.