MARRIAGE QUESTION: George Eliot's Double Life

When she was in her mid 30s, 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 24 years. Eliot asked people to call her 'Mrs Lewes' and dedicated each subsequent novel to her 'Husband'. Although they could not marry legally, 'this double life, which helps me to feel and think with double strength' was a relationship which scandalised her contemporaries yet she grew immeasurably within it. Academic philosopher Clare Carlisle explores the novelist's interrogation of Eliot's own 25 years of unsanctioned coupledom with Lewes and also the difficult love relationship she unleashed on her heroines. Beautifully balancing literary interpretation with biographical and philosophical reflection, Carlisle explores the gamble of yoking your happiness to the 'open-endedness of another human being'. The book traces in particular Eliot's influences from Goethe to Hegel, Comte and Darwin in a richly considered study that brings us close to the heart and mind of a great writer and a wise soul. Carlisle moves from novel to novel, and her chapter on Middlemarch, the masterpiece of Eliot's midlife, is an intense and empathetic study. 369pp, many photos and reproductions of letters and chapters covering vocation, motherhood, disillusion and success among them. 2023 US first edition.