The Marriage Question: George Eliot's Double Life -- Clare Carlisle, Hardcover

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

Author: Clare Carlisle
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 08/15/2023
Pages: 400
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.30lbs
Size: 9.10h x 6.40w x 1.40d
ISBN: 9780374600457

Review Citation(s):
Kirkus Reviews 05/01/2023
Publishers Weekly 06/05/2023
Library Journal 07/01/2023 pg. 68
Shelf Awareness 08/18/2023

About the Author
Clare Carlisle is Professor of Philosophy at King's College London. She is the author of several books, including Spinoza's Religion, Philosopher of the Heart: The Restless Life of Søren Kierkegaard, and On Habit. She has also edited George Eliot's translation of Spinoza's Ethics. She grew up in Manchester, studied philosophy and theology at Cambridge, and now lives in London.