The Marriage Question

June 5, 2023
In this captivating biography, Carlisle (Spinoza’s Religion), a philosophy professor at King’s College London, illuminates how the work of British novelist George Eliot (1819–1880) blossomed during her unsanctioned “marriage” to writer George Henry Lewes, who was already married to another woman with whom he had three children. Lewes and his wife were no longer living together when he eloped with the 34-year-old Eliot, scandalizing Victorian society. As Carlisle shows, what Eliot lost in respectability she gained in a life partner who encouraged her to become a novelist (not least because they needed the money) and acted as her de facto literary agent. Carlisle focuses on their “intellectual collaboration” and mutual devotion to each other, noting that Eliot supported Lewes’s scientific work as well as his wife and sons with the income from her successful novels Adam Bede and Middlemarch, while he was “steadfastly cheerful through her recurrent depressions, relentlessly encouraging through her self-doubt.” Carlisle’s cogent prose brings Eliot’s story to life, and astute literary analysis shows how Eliot’s biography influenced her novels; for example, Carlisle argues that in Middlemarch, the Brooke sisters’ “deep philosophical difference between idealism and empiricism” coupled with “mutual love” reflects Eliot’s dynamic with Lewes. This is a must for devotees of Victorian literature.