The Marriage Question
George Eliot's Double Life
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography
Named one of the ten Best Reviewed Nonfiction Books of 2023 by Literary Hub
A startling new portrait of George Eliot, the beloved novelist and a rare philosophical mind who explored the complexities of marriage.
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 also 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. Carlisle's searching new biography explores how marriage questions grow and change, and joins Eliot in her struggle to marry thought and feeling.
Includes black-and-white images
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.
