The Marriage Question: George Eliot's Double Life

Carlisle, Clare

ISBN 10: 0374600457 / ISBN 13: 9780374600457

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux (edition First Edition), 2023

About this Item

With dust jacket. It's a well-cared-for item that has seen limited use. The item may show minor signs of wear. All the text is legible, with all pages included. It may have slight markings and/or highlighting.

Seller Inventory # 0374600457-11-1-29

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Marriage Question: George Eliot's Double Life
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (edition First Edition)
• Publication Date: 2023
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0374600457
• ISBN 13: 9780374600457
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: First Edition.
• Condition: Very Good
• Dust Jacket Condition: Dust Jacket Included

About this title

Synopsis

Winner of the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography
Named one of the ten Best Reviewed Nonfiction Books of 2023 by Literary Hub

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

About the Author

Clare Carlisle is Professor of Philosophy at King's College London, UK. She is the author of several books including Philosopher of the Heart: The Restless Life of Søren Kierkegaard (2019), Spinoza's Religion: A New Reading of the Ethics (2021), and The Marriage Question: George Eliot's Double Life (2023).