The Marriage Question

George Eliot's Double Life

Format:

Buy the book from:

Amazon Blackwells Bookshop.org Foyles Hive Waterstones WHSmith

When she was 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.

Clare Carlisle's The Marriage Question is the best book I've read on George Eliot.

John Carey, Sunday Times

In this thrilling book, the academic philosopher Clare Carlisle explores the novelist's interrogation of "the double life", meaning not only Eliot's own 25 years of unsanctioned coupledom with Lewes, but also the difficult love relationships she unleashed on her heroines ... Carlisle offers no single and reductive answer because, of course, there isn't one. Instead, she points to the way that Eliot's response to the challenges of living and loving was always plural and protean, always on the point of taking on shimmering new shapes and dimensions. ... Carlisle speaks of wanting to employ biography as philosophical inquiry and here she succeeds magnificently. 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.

Kathryn Hughes, Guardian

Clare Carlisle brings the work of perhaps our finest English novelist into a brilliant new light. This book manages to be both engrossing and rigorous, inhabiting an intimate and expansive vision of creativity and the lived life. Following the pulsing and ever-vital questions of love, desire, compromise and companionship, The Marriage Question is both a thrilling work on Eliot and a probing, illuminating reflection on modern love.

Seán Hewitt

a new biography by Clare Carlisle, in which for the first time Eliot is placed properly in her full intellectual context, elucidating the ideas of her time in beautifully accessible prose. ... Carlisle's magisterial book has many facets to it: biographical, philosophical, literary. But as its title suggests, it's also about the theme of marriage, and Carlisle takes the reader into fascinating territory with the doubleness of Eliot's life. ... The Marriage Question is a splendid addition to the Eliot biographical canon ... a book that triumphantly enlarges our understanding of its subject, and of her time.

Kathy O’Shaughnessy, Financial Times

richly layered and absorbing ... Carlisle explores several kinds of "doubleness" that her subject kept in play throughout her life ... Carlisle conveys the fruits of her studies and reflection with a light, sometimes even lyrical touch ... As Clare Carlisle has shown, balancing breadth of knowledge with an emphatic close reading of her subject's life and work, Eliot's greatness - her continuing relevance - needs no special pleading

Jacqueline Banerjee, Times Literary Supplement

Clare Carlisle's principal achievement in The Marriage Question-a richly textured and absorbing biographical study-is to reveal how, over the course of her novels, essays and poetry, George Eliot systematically built a secular philosophy that concerned itself with morality. ... Carlisle moves from novel to novel, subjecting them to the exacting lens of philosophy. Her chapter on Middlemarch-the masterpiece of Eliot's middle life-is a dazzler ... Carlisle's intense, empathetic study reflects Eliot back to us, echoes her and rises up to meet her in order to give Eliot her philosophical due.

Marina Benjamin, Prospect

About Clare Carlisle

Clare Carlisle is Professor of Philosophy at King's College London. She is the author of seven 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 Hackney.

Details

Imprint: Penguin
Published: 28/03/2024
ISBN: 9780141992945
Length: 400 pages
Dimensions: 198mm x 22mm x 129mm
Weight: 292g
Price: £12.99

All editions

The Marriage Question

George Eliot's Double Life

Format:

Buy the book from:

About Clare Carlisle

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter