The Marriage Question: George Eliot's Double Life
(By Clare Carlisle)
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| Author | Clare Carlisle |
In the 1850s 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 became a wife. After eloping to Berlin with George Lewes—writer, philosopher, and married man—Eliot lived with him for twenty-four years. She asked people to call her “Mrs. Lewes” and dedicated each novel to her “husband.” They could not marry, yet she found herself initiated into the “great experience” of shared life—“this double life, which helps me to feel and think with double strength.”
Eliot’s leap into life with Lewes was a crisis from which she never recovered, though she grew immeasurably within it. Her contemporaries were scandalized by their relationship. At the same time, Lewes helped her to become George Eliot.
In The Marriage Question, philosophy professor Clare Carlisle reveals Eliot to be not only one of the greatest novelists of all time but a rare philosophical mind who explored, in art and in life, the paradoxes and complexities of marriage. This philosophical biography exposes Eliot’s immense and unconventional ambition, which undergirds the darker marriage plots of Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda. Reading her novels afresh, we find Eliot wrestling with themes that belong to a philosophy of marriage: choice and duty, passion and sacrifice, motherhood and creativity, trust and disillusion, destiny and chance.
Includes black-and-white images”
