The Marriage Question
George Eliot's Double Life
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
*A Times, Telegraph, TLS and Prospect Book of the Year*
*Winner of the 2024 PEN/ Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography*
‘The best book I've read on George Eliot’ John Carey, Sunday Times
An exceptional new biography that shows how George Eliot wrestled with the question of marriage, in art and life
When she was in her mid-thirties, Marian Evans transformed herself into George Eliot - an author celebrated for her genius as soon as she published her debut novel. During those years she also found her life partner, George Lewes - writer, philosopher and married father of three. After 'eloping' to Berlin in 1854 they lived together for twenty-four years: Eliot asked people to call her 'Mrs Lewes' and dedicated each novel to her 'Husband'. Though they could not legally marry, she felt herself initiated into the 'great experience' of marriage - 'this double life, which helps me to feel and think with double strength'. The relationship scandalized her contemporaries yet she grew immeasurably within it. Living at once inside and outside marriage, Eliot could experience this form of life - so familiar yet also so perplexing - from both sides.
In The Marriage Question Clare Carlisle reveals Eliot to be not only a great artist but a brilliant philosopher who probes the tensions and complexities of a shared life. Through the immense ambition and dark marriage plots of her novels we see Eliot wrestling - in art and in life - with themes of desire and sacrifice, motherhood and creativity, trust and disillusion, destiny and chance. Reading them afresh, Carlisle's searching new biography explores how marriage questions grow and change, and joins Eliot in her struggle to marry thought and feeling.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this captivating biography, Carlisle (Spinoza's Religion), a philosophy professor at King's College London, illuminates how the work of British novelist George Eliot (1819–1880) blossomed during her unsanctioned "marriage" to writer George Henry Lewes, who was already married to another woman with whom he had three children. Lewes and his wife were no longer living together when he eloped with the 34-year-old Eliot, scandalizing Victorian society. As Carlisle shows, what Eliot lost in respectability she gained in a life partner who encouraged her to become a novelist (not least because they needed the money) and acted as her de facto literary agent. Carlisle focuses on their "intellectual collaboration" and mutual devotion to each other, noting that Eliot supported Lewes's scientific work as well as his wife and sons with the income from her successful novels Adam Bede and Middlemarch, while he was "steadfastly cheerful through her recurrent depressions, relentlessly encouraging through her self-doubt." Carlisle's cogent prose brings Eliot's story to life, and astute literary analysis shows how Eliot's biography influenced her novels; for example, Carlisle argues that in Middlemarch, the Brooke sisters' "deep philosophical difference between idealism and empiricism" coupled with "mutual love" reflects Eliot's dynamic with Lewes. This is a must for devotees of Victorian literature.
Customer Reviews
Marriage of inconvenience
4.5 stars
The author is an English professor of philosophy whose previous books include ‘Philosopher of the Heart: The Restless Life of Søren Kierkegaard’ (2019) and ‘Spinoza's Religion: A New Reading of the Ethics’ (2021).
The jump in subject matter from Portuguese-Dutch philosopher to English novelist might not be immediately obvious, but one of the major writing projects completed by Mary Anne Evans (aka Marian Evans, aka Marian Lewes, aka George Eliot) during the several years she and George Lewes spent in Germany after they first got together was an English translation of Spinoza’s ‘Ethics’ (eventually published in 1981 in case you were interested).
British society of the mid-Victorian era never forgave Eliot for shacking up with a married dude who had three kids with his lawful wedded wife, even though she was a serial philanderer who had a few of her own with other blokes. (They didn’t need MAFS in Victorian England.)
Ms Carlisle covers the usual biographical detail and reflects on the different moral standards to which men and women were held at the time (and still are according to some, possibly many). The differences from conventional biographies are the philosophical undertones of how her subject’s relationship with Lewes, and various events in her life inspired and influenced the creation of several of her greatest works, and some of the lesser known and less successful ones. (I’m looking at you, Romola)
The writing is astute and accessible, and the philosophical insights bring a new dimension to literary criticism, particularly with regard to Eliot’s towering achievement ‘Middlemarch,” of which I never tire.