The Marriage Question: George Eliot's Double Life

"Reading George Eliot, and reading about George Eliot, is always very emotional. Clare Carlisle is obviously a very interesting philosopher, and what qualifies her as a good Eliot biographer is that she herself has translated Spinoza , and can talk about her work in expert terms. But the book is not short of emotional power; she clearly feels the impact of Eliot’s work and Eliot’s life. She does a bit of both. It’s nuanced and careful and brief. It’s really quite touching at the end. This is suitable, because George Eliot herself said that an appeal to moral sensibility through statistics and reason is not good enough. This is true; now we have behavioural economics telling us that people remember stories and they do not remember graphs, right? Eliot was saying this in the 1850s: you need to embed the idea in real talk, real actions, the real stories of a life. I think Middlemarch is the most recommended book on Five Books , right? There you go. But the reason Middlemarch is one of the most successful books, ever, is because it’s not just a story, but a work of philosophy where the ideas walk around and come to maturity in the way that a life does. What George Eliot was saying was: if you explain life in abstract terms, what good is that? In the 19th century they were grappling with questions of what it means to live in a humane way without God, the effect of political reform on small and prosperous communities (and vice versa), and how technological change affects moral behaviour. What does it mean to have a good marriage or a bad marriage? These are questions that were being written about insistently and incessantly in different terms. But the book that has survived above all is a novel that treats those questions seriously. Here’s what happens when this woman marries this man. Here, by the way, is how that might interact with the God question, the politics question, and all the rest of it. Clare Carlisle shares with Eliot that dual aspect of the abstract and the particular. Absolutely. And Carlisle blends it all very artfully. You don’t get lots on what Eliot was like as a child, we just get on with her life. But Carlisle writes about translations of Strauss or Feuerbach by Eliot, and how they impact her work. It has wonderful balance. It is so apt for George Eliot that it is not a straight biography nor a traditional intellectual biography, but sits somewhere in the middle. The section on the marriage to John Cross is wonderful. To my mind, it’s one of the peak pieces of biographical writing of our times. Cross had mental health problems and jumped out of a window during the honeymoon. It was absolutely devastating. As you say: why did she marry this man? Well, for practical reasons and emotional support reasons. Carlisle breaks the narrative and says: At this point, my editor told me ‘I don’t like her anymore.’ Then she offers us a wonderful explanation, a great George Eliot move, that sensitively handles the topic without pages of judgement and analysis but a brief interpretation. You have to feel your way through the complexities yourself. It’s just so deft. I really, really hope Carlisle writes more biographies. I think that’s a Victorian thing. A lot of the great Victorian intellectuals were at home, they weren’t at the university. I know that sounds very trivial, but if you are George Eliot and George Henry Lewes, or John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor Mill, you stayed at home to write your books. That’s just how it was. The great intellectuals of our own time are often professors and their work is much more institutional. I mean, Charles Darwin barely left his house after he got back from the Beagle voyage."