*A Times Telegraph TLS and Prospect Book of the Year*'The best book I've read on George
Eliot' John Carey Sunday TimesAn exceptional new biography that shows how George Eliot
wrestled with the question of marriage in art and life 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. 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.
