The Marriage Question: George Eliot's Double Life

by Clare Carlisle

An exceptional new biography that shows how George Eliot wrestled with the question of marriage, in art and lifeWhen 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 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 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. Reading them afresh, Carlisle's searching new biography explores how marriage questions grow and change, and joins Eliot in her struggle to marry thought and feeling.

Genres: Biography, Nonfiction, History, Philosophy, Literature, Womens, Biography Memoir

368 pages, Hardcover

Published March 23, 2023

Reviews

[emma]

becoming a dad (reading historical nonfiction)

[Richard · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a wonderful book. Exceptionally insightful, revelatory, and, above all, accessible to all. It is not a dusty academic work, and I encourage anyone with even a passing interest in George Eliot to add it to their collection.

George Eliot was an intellectual and a truly gifted author. She fully deserves to be recognised in the same breath as Shakespeare. I agree with those who rank Middlemarch as the greatest novel in the English language. I am understandably enamoured at her capacity to entertain readers with such additionally brilliant works of fiction, such as The Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner, and Daniel Deronda.

It was fascinating to read about her fiery and resolute character – how she stood up for women’s rights, how she was a victim of social judgement - her ‘impropriety’ shocked and scandalised the ‘civilised’ Victorian society of the day. She was years ahead of her time. Yet I was intrigued to learn how modest and vulnerable she was too. The likes of Bronte inspired her writing and I wonder whether Eliot was conflicted – that personal happiness versus responsibility to others was mutually dependent?

It is satisfying to know that she finally and rightfully received a memorial stone at Poet’s Corner in Westminster Abbey. However, as I write this on International Women’s Day, the irony is not lost on me that a female author was forced to adopt a male pen name in order to be taken seriously.

My thanks to NetGalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for granting this e-ARC in exchange for an honest review

[Elizabeth · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Eliot's leap into life with Lewes was a crisis from which she never recovered, though she grew immeasurably within it...her marriage helped her to become George Eliot" (Preface, x-xi).

"Her willingness to think in the medium of human relations and emotions, and to carry out that thinking in images, symbols, and archetypes, expands the canonical view of philosophy that is embedded in universities--institutions that systematically excluded women until the twentieth century" (Preface, xi).

I happily continued my Victober tradition of reading an author biography during the month with The Marriage Question. I expected it to take the whole month, but it was so compelling that I found myself wanting to get back to it.

The title of this biography--The Marriage Question--is so apropos for George Eliot's life. I imagine that married people quite often reflect on what it means to be married in any age, but Eliot's scandalous shared life with Lewes that they called marriage but wasn't provoked so many intense social, theological, and philosophical questions for Eliot, for her friends, and for the public as she became George Eliot, the great writer and a well-known personage. Claire Carlisle has a background in philosophy, which is a perfect match for Eliot and Lewes, who were both intensely intellectual readers and thinkers. I read another biography of Eliot this year by Jenny Uglow that I also enjoyed very much, but I appreciated that Carlisle's background gave her unique insight into how Eliot's extensive reading shaped both her novels and her highly unusual relationship with Lewes. The interplay in this book between biography and literary exploration of Eliot's novels is perfectly balanced.

I especially loved chapters 5, 6, and 7, which cover the earlier days of Lewes and Eliot's marriage-that’s-not-a-marriage and Eliot's writing of The Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner, and Romola. I read The Mill on the Floss in January and felt conflicted about it at the time, but I've loved it increasingly as time has passed. I thought Carlisle's insights into the novel were very helpful, including on the heroine Maggie's own marriage question that remains unresolved. In some ways, Maggie echoes Eliot's own struggle to reconcile her brilliant mind and her longing for human love. Maggie's story has a very different end than Eliot's but the same passions simmer in them. Maggie and Eliot's stories both involve more than just the marriage question, too. There are friendships and family relationships that make up each individual's complex life.

Chapter 6 examines Eliot's role as a mother, of sorts, to Lewes' three sons. Carlisle also examines Eliot's travels to the Continent with Lewes and how much Eliot loved the images of the Madonna they came across in Italy. This is fascinating because several of Eliot's heroines are described with Madonna-like beauty, including Romola and Dorothea, so I love that this image remained in Eliot's imagination. It's also part of what makes her relationship to Christianity so interesting. She rejected Christianity and yet her decision to forego marriage and motherhood herself meant that she was always wrestling with the sacramental nature of both. She could approximate them with Lewes and Lewes' sons, but what makes marriage and motherhood real? In Silas Marner, she fleshes out what makes motherhood real in a beautiful way and through an unlikely figure: a man who becomes both father and mother to a miracle child.

In Romola, she explores the marriage question from a different perspective. Can a married woman who is deeply unhappy somehow be free of marriage? The Marriage Question becomes intertwined with the Woman Question of the day. What room is there in society for women like Eliot and her heroines who have remarkable traits of passion, intellect, idealism, and virtue? Eliot was able to find her niche. Do her heroines? Do her contemporary women? It's endlessly fascinating.

I'm not sure I loved Carlisle's explorations of Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda quite as much, but I plan to re-read both the novels and these chapters in the future and ponder them more. Carlisle focuses more on Gwendolen than on Daniel Deronda and doesn't seem to have the same impression of Daniel that I cherish of him.

Even though I have mixed feelings about Lewes, there is no doubt that he and Eliot were deeply attached over their 20+ years of shared life and he was instrumental in her success as George Eliot. His death was a great blow to Eliot, and I love how Carlisle puts her rather surprising marriage to John Walter Cross in perspective given Eliot's full life and her struggle with the scandal of her connection to Lewes. As always, I was moved by Eliot's death. I love biographies for the way they humanize these outsize figures of art but also retain the mystery that comes with genius.

I highly recommend this biography to those who love Eliot's fiction and who are intrigued by the woman herself: a complex figure who wrestled so well with her own questions, both in life and in fiction.

[fatma · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars

Carlisle is such an astute and insightful writer, but something about this book didn't quite click with me. To be sure, it is a book very much about marriage and "the marriage question," but I think I was looking for more analysis from the author rather than just an exploration of Eliot's life and works and how they intersect with questions related to marriage. I also feel like there was so much here about Eliot's novels--and they are, of course, a reflection of her concerns and interests--but I wanted more about Eliot herself. The ideas were there, but I was missing a more cohesive analysis of and reflection on those ideas, rather than just a discussion of what they entailed. Something more in line with the preface to this book, which I adored, and which set me up to expect something that the book fell short of. It's a real shame, because when this book is good, it's so good--Carlisle's writing is just gorgeous--but the more I read on the more I missed what impressed me about that opening chapter.

[Melody Schwarting · Rating 5 out of 5]

A really marvelous, slow look at marriage in Eliot's life and work. Carlisle probes each fictional marriage as she considers Eliot's partnership with G. H. Lewes and her marriage to John Cross. Carlisle is a philosopher but this book is not full of jargon. It is exceedingly readable and thoroughly enjoyable for a lover of Eliot's novels such as myself. I have a deeper appreciation for Eliot, and a better understanding of certain aspects of her life, than I did before. Highly recommended to Eliot readers.

-----

[regarding the opening pages of Middlemarch] "Full of ease, they read as if their author has emerged from the valley of the shadow of death to bright green pastures rolling beneath a glorious sky. George Eliot's earlier novels are tragedies with comic scenes breaking through like patches of light in a clouded landscape; their humour, as in Shakespeare's tragedies, is often concentrated in minor characters. Their openings, in particular, tend to be thickety. By contrast, 'Miss Brooke' is sun-filled comedy that carries an immense weight lightly and draws the reader, apparently without effort, into its earnestness." (192)

"George Eliot the author, however, overcomes the rift between idealism and empiricism, even as she explores this difference through her characters. She brings the scientist's eye to Middlemarch, as well as the artist's hand and the philosopher's soul. With observations as fine as its conception is large, this novel accomplished, for the first time in English fiction, a synthesis of universal and particular, of inner truth and outer world, of spirit and nature, of theme and form--a synthesis far more complete than Hegelian philosophy could achieve, despite its encyclopaedic ambition." (206)

"Eliot understood that emotional truths are more layered than linear, with deep interior dimensions. These truths provoke political questions, spiritual questions, cosmic questions. Intense, subtle, tender, they must be handled with great care. This is what is so exciting about Eliot's philosophy. She searched for truths not in order to form crisp definitions or moral judgments, but to make space for souls to grow, to stay curious, to feel alive." (266)

[Grace Jack · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my favourite books I’ve ever read. A beautiful and moving exploration of the connections between George Eliot’s life, literature and philosophy, whilst also exploring the philosophy of marriage and lifelong love more generally. Stunning.

[Janelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this well written biography of George Eliot. It covers her life and works with particular focus on marriage. Of course George Eliot was unable to marry her partner George Henry Lewes but they lived as a married couple suffering the judgement of her family and Victorian society. An interesting read.

[Jane · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a fascinating book and a kind of biography of a marriage (that wasn't a marriage at all, legally speaking)--that of Mary Ann Evans/Mrs. Marian Lewes/George Eliot and George Henry Lewes. Clare Carlisle is a wonderful writer and this take on George Eliot is imaginative and probing in all the best ways. Carlisle's story of Eliot's marriage question finds correspondences between Eliot's life and her writings, explores the multiple identities Eliot took on, and, most importantly, looks at marriage in all its guises and instances in Eliot's life and Eliot's writing in 19th C England. Eliot was, at the very least, a proto-feminist and progressive (yes, there were deviations from both), and she was certainly assertive of her own independence of mind and right to think as fully as men of the era--including George Lewes, Herbert Spenser, Benjamin Jowett, and others. She simultaneously struggled with self-confidence and depression. She was apparently lovable and I know I have always found her to be so as I have read her novels and in reading about her.

I suppose it is a truism to say that all marriages and the people who comprise them are inscrutable. In the end, you can't plumb the depths of either, not all the way. And yet that is what Eliot attempts in her novels and what Carlisle does in this book. I am always curious about what it would be like to live in another time, what it would be to be another person, or to be myself but alive in another era, or to be George Eliot. I think it would likely be much stranger than you might imagine, even in your own language or your own country. The meanings would have shifted, all the social dynamics would be altered and all those differences might be even difficult to detect. Even so, Eliot's novels always achieve this for me, take to those times and places in ways both strange and familiar. The Marriage Question does the same thing with the lives of Eliot and Lewes and their marriage.

Toward the end of Eliot's life, after George Lewes' death, she marries again to a much younger man. They honeymoon in Italy and at one point he jumps from a window in what the police call a suicide attempt. He survives. Their marriage survives another couple years to Eliot's death. He writes devotedly about his wife afterwards. Those are facts. Without a doubt, it is one of the strangest denouements of a life I have encountered. Why did all those things happen? Carlisle offers some educated guesses but it remains, I think, a mystery. I get my glimpses into what it must have been like, but that's all: glimpses, veiled, through a glass darkly. At the same time, George Eliot's 'real-ness' comes shining through and her story is as rich, puzzling, evocative as the stories she wrote.

By the way, if you read this book the notes at the back are wonderful, extensive and well worth checking as you go. I didn't and am annoyed with myself at having to work through them after the fact.

[Maria · Rating 5 out of 5]

Made me want to re-read and read all of Eliot’s stuff.

I loved getting some biographical background, particularly about her writing process and what they were reading.

[Gina Dalfonzo · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'll be honest, I tend to get very bored with writings about George Eliot that end up sounding like hagiographies. (Maybe I wouldn't mind it so much if I enjoyed Eliot's novels more, but anyway ....) Credit goes to Clare Carlisle for doing everything she could to avoid the temptation, though you can tell it was a struggle sometimes! Her Eliot, though indeed inhabiting a lofty plane of moral earnestness, is still human and dealing with complex human dilemmas, not always in the wisest way.

I was also a bit curious about how Carlisle was going to handle Eliot's "marriage" when it wasn't actually a marriage. But she handles that well too, showing how Eliot's relationship with George Lewes was both similar to and different from an actual marriage, and tracing its effects on their perspective and characters for -- well, for better and for worse. One intriguing angle that is touched on, but could have been explored more, is Eliot's takeover of the "mother" role with Lewes's sons, apparently with no serious thought or concern about how their own still-living mother might have felt about it. (Granted, Agnes hadn't been a faithful wife, but then Lewes hadn't been a faithful husband.) What Carlisle does say about Eliot's actions and Agnes Lewes's position is intriguing; I wish she had said more.

One more thing (minor, but important to me): Lewes deserved to be kicked around the block for what he said about Dickens, after Dickens had been friendly to Eliot, and at a time when she badly needed friends!

You may be wondering by now why I read about Eliot at all. Sometimes I wonder myself. :-) I suppose it's just because she was an interesting person living in an interesting time. And because some writers, the ones who don't get too caught up in hagiography, have very interesting things to say about her, her writing, and her era. Count Clare Carlisle as one of those writers.

(Thanks to NetGalley for the review copy. I meant to mark this Kindle Edition, but I screwed it up and marked Hardcover instead. Oh well!)

[J · Rating 5 out of 5]

Invaluable take on George Eliot (as philosopher) and a philosophy of marriage in the 19th century. I love that of all Eliot's works, Middlemarch was discussed the least and her more difficult / less adored works (namely Romola and Silas Marner) were more thoroughly examined and connected to her diary and life events by the author. Highly recommend for those interested in 19th century literature, especially if you liked Middlemarch but haven't read much of Eliot's other work, as this is such a great primer for her more difficult novels. Also really enjoyed the audiobook narrated by the author who has a lovely, soothing voice.

[Pchu · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a mixture of philosophy, biography, and literary criticism which I found very compelling to read. It made me appreciate George Eliot even more.






....also Charles Dickens sucks

[Sarah Martin · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed the approach this author took of merging philosophy and primary resources to analyze the life and mind of George Eliot. It did justice to the complexity of her life situation and the complexity all humans face in a world of choices that are inevitability scrutinized by the public eye.

[Mary Camille Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a fascinating approach to George Eliot, mixing biography and descriptions of the novels with a focus on Eliot’s relationship with her life partner George Lewes and how she explored “the marriage question” in fiction. I knew Eliot as the beloved author of Middlemarch; now I have a deep appreciation for her brilliant mind (she was a philosopher as well as an artist) and what it meant in 18th-century England to live with a man one wasn’t married to.

[Susan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is excellent. I appreciated the thorough tour of Eliot's writing--including some of the works with which I was less familiar like her poetry and last collection of essays. And focusing the biography on one major topic: marriage, gave a clear shape and direction to a life that could seem overwhelming to summarize. Eliot left behind so many letters and other primary materials (including her long and rich novels) and had so many important relationships, that she's a challenging biographical subject. I was convinced by Carlisle's idea that Eliot's "marriage" to George Henry Lewes and her ideas about what marriage means were excellent lenses to use to understand this incredibly complicated person. As someone who has thought a lot about marriage, who is married myself to a philosopher and a biographer, and who has dabbled in a little Eliot scholarship myself, and who is a middle-aged woman, I am probably an ideal reader for this book. There are a few quirky choices later in this book: a passage where Carlisle directly addresses to her editor is a reconstructed dialogue about one of her interpretative choices and there is one place where she gets a little too speculative about hidden tensions between Eliot and Lewes. But both of these choices happened late in the biography and I was already hooked. Readers who have read Eliot's major novels will get the most out of this biography, but this is well-written and accessible. I highly recommend.

[Courtney Johnston]

I forget where I found the recc for this book (I read about one biography a year so there must’ve been a good reason).

I knew nothing about Marian / Mary Anne Evans / Lewes / George Eliot before reading this, and had read none of her books.

I read it incredibly slowly (for me) probably over two months, which was also a stressful period, and at times I was just using it to send me to sleep after four pages. But when I got stuck into the second half I enjoyed it enormously.

Carlisle teases out Eliot’s “marriage” to George Lewes (who was separated from his wife Agnes, mother of three of his sons, had a long running relationship with the father of her other children) alongside her growing writing career and fame / notoriety. Eliot and Lewes lived together for twenty plus years in an un-sanctioned marriage they defended fiercely; he assisted (and manipulated) her career and writing, as she did his. Carlisle tracks their relationship, Eliot’s interactions with friends, family and the publishing world, and her growing list of novels, many of which centre on female characters grappling with a form of “the marriage question”.

A thoroughly good book if you want to learn about the woman, her books, and her times.

[Caroline · Rating 4 out of 5]

I picked this up at the library despite, not because of, the title... And on the whole I'm glad I did. Carlisle's sympathetic reading of Elliot's life and work, with the eye of a philosopher, remind me that I want to reread Middlemarch.

On the one hand, must we view a woman writer through the lens of her personal experience of marriage, even when it was complex? Would we do that with, for example, serial adulterer Dickens, or Wilkie Collins who at least for awhile maintained two households? Just to choose two 19th century novelists.

On the other hand - issues around marriage - to marry or not, and to whom, and how it turns out - do seem to dominate Eliot's work. She was not only aware of the dangers of ill-considered marriage, but willing to fill her pages with them despite the popular mythologizing of marriage.

So, I'm ambivalent about the book's concept, but I enjoyed its contents.

[Linda Snow · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is such a marvelously fascinating book about an author that I have been enthralled with for all of my adult life. It is brilliantly researched and written to cover all facets of Eliot’s life under the broad and challenging theme of the marriage question—and there are so many marriage questions indeed! All of which are still being asked today by everyone who joins their lives together with another. Thought versus emotion is the fine thread through all of the questions. I’m in love with Mary Anne Evans. Truly.

[Ella Edelman · Rating 4 out of 5]

I want to read more books like this one. Carlisle blends philosophy, literary criticism, and cultural history with a masterful survey of George Eliot’s oeuvre into a readable book that inspired both greater empathy for the author while also complicating my understanding of her. The discussion of marriage in is fascinating, and I learned so much about the philosophical and religious underpinnings of its place in Eliot’s intellectual world. While I quibbled a bit with some of Carlisle's interpretations of Middlemarch–whether for good reason, I'm not sure–she convinced me that even apart from that novel (which I loved), Eliot's other books are just as worthy of my time.

[Venneh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Picked this up from the library - fascinating read about a Victorian woman who wrote as a man, and her marriage (which was never formally cemented because it was to a man who never fully divorced his wife), along with philosophy of the time and how it all played into what she wrote. It made me pick up at least one of her books from the library, which for me is the mark of a very good nonfiction book.

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think marriage as an institution is fascinating and eminently worthy of interrogation, and I also love the novels of George Eliot, so the fact that Clare Carlisle's book combines both of these subjects made it immediately appealing to me. It's full of fascinating detail on Eliot's life and key relationships- most significantly her nearly lifelong partnership with George Lewes, which was a marriage in every sense except legally - and through close analysis of the novels Carlisle constructs a compelling picture of Eliot's thoughts and beliefs about marriage and human connection.

[Martha · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had read an earlier book about Eliot’s “marriage”, but enjoyed this brief, well researched one better. Eliot’s life with Lewes, despite inevitable problems, was a writing life. The life she wanted. Lucky.
The second marriage gave her a young husband to see to her affairs after her death. (There is a honeymoon incident that is very bizarre! )

[Alex · Rating 4 out of 5]

I knew very little of George Eliot before reading this except for the fact that I enjoyed middlemarch. This was a great biography, really digestible considering some of the really big philosophical ideas. But I really enjoyed thinking about marriage and I agree that it deserves more attention. I’ll definitely be reading more of Eliot too!

[Madeline · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lovely book.

[Erin Gallacher · Rating 5 out of 5]

LOVED, no notes never underlined so many quotes in a book before

[Anne Green · Rating 5 out of 5]

It was George Eliot’s personification of the marriage question in her own life that excited as much, if not more, curiosity as her depiction of it through the characters in her books. This is impressively documented in a new book “The Marriage Question: George Eliot’s Double Life”, written by Clare Carlisle and to be released by Farrar Straus & Giroux in August this year. Carlisle gives us an account of George Eliot’s life through the prism of her twin identities, both inside and outside what she herself called the “great experience of marriage”. Carlisle is Professor of Philosophy at King’s College, London and has authored six books previously.

In this book she mixes remarkable insights into the influences that shaped and determined Eliot’s life with astute analysis of her literary development and the philosophical thought that informed her fiction. Emphasising the deeply scholarly nature of Eliot’s preparation for and development of the works that have rightly established her as one of the greatest English novelists, Carlisle sheds light on the genesis of books, stories and poems that earned Eliot the reputation of a genius. Informed by her rigorous classical education in literature, philosophy, science and religion, Eliot created fictional works that not only became popular bestsellers, but appealed to a culturally sophisticated and scholarly audience and are still loved and admired today.

To what extent Eliot’s literary career was dependent on the support and promotion of George Henry Lewes, with whom she lived in a common law marriage for 24 years, has been the subject of considerable debate and is examined in the book, in particular in regard to the financial benefits that accrued to Lewes by virtue of his protegée’s growing fame and commercial success. Carlisle notes several times that Eliot consented to her income, both from her family inheritance and the royalties from her publisher, being paid into Lewes’s account. Without directly implying that Lewes’s interest in his wife’s continued success was prompted largely by self-interest, the inference can easily be made that Eliot’s surrender of her independence, both financial, and as an active participant in the wellbeing of her own literary career was strongly encouraged by Lewes. It’s astonishing to read, especially in light of Eliot’s blazing ambition from a young age to become a great writer, that she happily consented to him shielding her from reviews of her work by cutting them out of publications before she saw them. Such a practice hints strongly at manipulation rather than protection. If she read too many unfavourable reviews, presumably she might become discouraged enough to give up writing altogether and so deprive Lewes of the benefits of her labour.

Giving Lewes such unfettered control of every aspect of her career, as Carlisle suggests, may have been her way of assuaging the disjunction between them in terms of their “improper” alliance, and even of compensating, in a way, for the fact that she was widely perceived, at least in the physical sense, as an unattractive and undesirable mate. (Interestingly Henry James apparently referred to her as “a great horse faced bluestocking”). While her intellectual gifts were unquestionably superior, Eliot was never confident about her womanly appeal.

The great strength of Carlisle’s book is her insightful reading of Eliot’s emotional nature which makes clear that the price of success for her was a physically, emotionally and intellectually demanding striving to coexist as both woman and artist. Contrary to Eliot’s somewhat rapturous statement that “this double life, which helps me to feel and think with double strength”, Carlisle’s account suggests it wasn’t as straightforward as that.

Compromise, it’s clear, was essential on many levels for Eliot to resolve the contradiction between her longing for a loving soulmate and her yearning for “creative fulfilment”. Such a dilemma posed uncharted challenges to a nineteenth century woman schooled in the belief that dependency on a man (hopefully through marriage) was a worthy ambition or even a necessary precondition to finding the kind of fulfilment her intellect demanded.

Much of Carlisle’s evaluation and interpretation is presented through the perspective of philosophy, not surprisingly as this is her field. It’s not however so heavily academic that it’s beyond the reach of the layperson. On the contrary, Carlisle writes lucidly and with obvious passion about the brilliance of Eliot the writer and the lesser known, but much speculated upon, Eliot the woman. Both aspects of her life were inevitably interdependent however readers who may be more interested in the life and the legend than the literary canon will not be disappointed.

[Dawn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Anyone questioning the difficulties and joys of marriage while providing (Victorian) literary and philosophical context is going to get a thumbs up from me. A no-nonsense breath of fresh air that made me literally run to bookstore to get Daniel Deronda.

[Jenna Watson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wasn’t expecting to like this so much! Sometimes pseudo-academic topical books feel forced but this analysis of Eliot’s life and relationships naturally fit with analysis of her novels and enhanced future readings of her work. I appreciated that the author didn’t bring in her own life and turn this into a “memoir of my life alongside Eliot”, but kept it focused and analytical. The writing was also lovely and the end made a beautiful case for the enduring relevance of Eliot’s questions (which are eternal, in my mind).

[Candlin · Rating 4 out of 5]

George Eliot is the author of one of my most favorite books: Middlemarch. I have read a number of biographies of Eliot, trying to catch a glimpse of the mysterious woman who wrote it. This biography does it!

The Marriage Question illuminates Eliot’s philosophy, her struggles, and the experiences that made it possible for her to write a book with such depth.

I appreciated Carlisle’s willingness to engage with all the mysteries of writing a life about a writer and her marriage—How difficult it is to understand our own relationships, much less one from the 1800s, with so much lost, or never written down. She leaves the mystery in and says when she has questions that she can’t answer.

Carlisle does a great job, doesn’t overstep, doesn’t make things up. I learned a lot about Eliot and her people and times.

Carlisle also brings out what a philosopher Eliot was. Eliot read deeply and thought deeply. I appreciate having a window into Eliot’s intentions, her influences, and her process.

Well written and full of interesting detail, If you are interested in Eliot, this book will be worth your time.

[Deborah Siddoway · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is not an academic review, although some of my thoughts are influenced by my PhD research on divorce law reform in the nineteenth century.

This is a wonderfully entertaining, well-written, and thoroughly researched book exploring the issue of marriage as it impacted on the life and works of George Eliot. For those knowing little of Eliot's romantic life, and the fact that she had the temerity to challenge norms of Victorian respectability by choosing to live with a man who was married to another woman, thereby subverting and challenging expected social norms of how a woman was to behave, much biographical information is provided.

Carlisle spends a lot of time considering the marriage question - and the philosophical thoughts and arguments underpinned what a marriage was - in the context of the life of a woman who was herself very much concerned with question. There is no doubt that Eliot was an extraordinarily intelligent woman, her drive and ambition leading her to undertake work as a translator, editor, and contributor to publications such as the Westminster Review and the Leader. The author links this work, particularly her translation of Feuerbach's The Essence of Christianity to Eliot's life choices and her elopement with the married George Henry Lewes. She then explores Eliot's thinking on marriage, and the marital relationship, within her work as an emerging - and then renowned - novelist.

I did have a few thoughts on some of the more academic issues, for example, Carlisle somewhat glosses over the development of English marriage law (see p. 59), and what makes a legal marriage, two things that were of vital importance of Eliot's own conception of marriage and why she was able to make a decision to live with a married man that accorded with this conception of marriage. And I did laugh to see Wilkie Collins described as an 'editor' of Household Words (p. 63). There were no editors of that particular publication, only a conductor - one - and his name was Dickens.

It was the issues around Lewes's inability to divorce his wife Agnes to enable him to marry Eliot that I was the most interested in. Carlisle provides an unusually good summary of divorce law reform (pp. 175-6) and what reforms to divorce law did - and didn't - do. However, Lewes's inaction (or inability) to divorce his wife, while in part may have been driven by a desire to protect his wife and children from inevitable scandal, would also have been difficult because of Lewes's condonation of his wife's affair. She also states (in the notes, not in the main body of the text) that prior to the 1857 Act that divorce was impossible for Lewes for financial reasons, citing the 1957 Woodhouse article. However, the recent work of Wolfram has gone some way to show that divorce was not as expensive as it was reputed to have been. In my view the two biggest obstacles to divorce for Lewes were firstly the desire to avoid scandal and potential social stigmatisation for all the parties involved, including Lewes's children. Although divorce, in theory, became more accessible following the 1857 Divorce Act, the number of divorces remained statistically insignificant (Lawrence Stone points to this, as does Roderick Phillips) and remained subject to a high degree of public interest, scrutiny, and societal disapproval. The second issue which may have precluded divorce would have been the 'condonation' of Agnes's affair. For such an important issue, I would have liked to have seen this fleshed out more in the book, rather than hidden away in the notes, which I think insufficient in a book with purports to examine the marriage question, especially when the book postulates that Eliot's conception of marriage was an intrinsic component of her philosophical viewpoint, which spilled over into her literature (p. 330).

On that note, condonation (remissio injuriæ) means forgiveness and reconciliation, and where the marital injury is deliberately and knowingly condoned by the party injured there is no alternative but to dismiss a petition for divorce. However, as nineteenth-century barrister Macqueen notes, the issue of condonation is one that is very difficult to deal with judicially, and is considered a question of fact, not of law. It would have been interesting for Carlisle to have considered in more depth (and certainly not in a note) why Lewes chose not to test this issue in a court. He seemed to have asked a lot of Eliot - for her to sacrifice her standing in society, to alienate herself from her family, to challenge her friendships - in order for her to live with him as his 'wife', while he seemed unprepared to expose himself to the same degree of public censure by allowing his marriage, and his condonation of Agnes's affair, to be tested judicially.

All of the technical legal points aside, this book is a really interesting account of the life of Eliot and the way in which she wrestled with marriage. I definitely recommend it for those with any interest in Eliot's life and literature.