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The Marriage Question: George Eliot's Double Life
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About This Book
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
Reviews
"As Clare Carlisle has shown, balancing breadth of knowledge with an empathetic close reading of her subject's life and work, Eliot's greatness – her continuing relevance – needs no special pleading."
"Highly illuminating ..."
"This is a must for devotees of Victorian literature."
"Scholarly and thoughtful."
"Carlisle...combines a biographer's eye for stories with a philosopher's nose for questions ..."
"Carlisle is an empathetic and ambitious interpreter."
"That keenly private treasure remains safely behind the curtain after all."
"Finally, Eliot has got the biographer she deserves, namely an ardent and eloquent feminist philosopher who shows us how and why Eliot's books...are as philosophically profound as any treatise written by a man."
"Carlisle brings a frank realism to the ideology of heterosexual marriage under modern capitalism, as when discussing Eliot's own squeamishness about writing and finances ..."
"Carlisle's inquiry into Eliot's intimate relationships with friends and lovers mirrors Eliot's own psychologically astute interrogation of her characters' 'inner lives' ..."
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