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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
"Carlisle explores, in depth, themes of philosophy and marriage in Eliot's art and life, highlighting dynamics like desire and morality, in a book that combines biography, philosophy, history, and literary interpretation."
"Highly illuminating ..."
"Carlisle is...a gifted storyteller."
"The book's broader claims are largely platitudes ..."
"With great skill and delicacy she has filleted details from Eliot's own life, read closely into her wonderful novels and, most importantly, considered the wider philosophical background in which she was operating."
"Masterly and enriching."
"With formidable erudition and insight, this sympathetic author paints her own memorable portrait of the soft-spoken woman who quietly revolutionized the English novel—and who scandalized society by never marrying her husband."
"This is a must for devotees of Victorian literature."
"A splendid addition to the Eliot biographical canon."
"Carlisle refuses to speculate as to whether Eliot physically consummated her love for either of her husbands ..."
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