The Marriage Question

Clare Carlisle's The Marriage Question is the best book I've read on George Eliot. -- John Carey * Sunday Times *

In this thrilling book, the academic philosopher Clare Carlisle explores the novelist's interrogation of "the double life", meaning not only Eliot's own 25 years of unsanctioned coupledom with Lewes, but also the difficult love relationships she unleashed on her heroines ... Carlisle offers no single and reductive answer because, of course, there isn't one. Instead, she points to the way that Eliot's response to the challenges of living and loving was always plural and protean, always on the point of taking on shimmering new shapes and dimensions. ... Carlisle speaks of wanting to employ biography as philosophical inquiry and here she succeeds magnificently. With great skill and delicacy she has filleted details from Eliot's own life, read closely into her wonderful novels and, most importantly, considered the wider philosophical background in which she was operating. -- Guardian * Kathryn Hughes *

The Marriage Question already has the stamp of a classic and is bound to enter the canon of great biographies. I was amazed by the clarity of Clare Carlisle's language; she deals with the most complex ideas with miraculous ease. It was a delight to read while at the same time being deeply thought-provoking. I'm already looking forward to reading this magnificent book again. -- Celia Paul

Finally, Eliot has got the biographer she deserves, namely an ardent and eloquent feminist philosopher who shows us how and why Eliot's books, rightly read, are as philosophically profound as any treatise written by a man. -- Stuart Jeffries * Observer *

Clare Carlisle brings the work of perhaps our finest English novelist into a brilliant new light. This book manages to be both engrossing and rigorous, inhabiting an intimate and expansive vision of creativity and the lived life. Following the pulsing and ever-vital questions of love, desire, compromise and companionship, The Marriage Question is both a thrilling work on Eliot and a probing, illuminating reflection on modern love. -- Sean Hewitt

richly layered and absorbing ... Carlisle explores several kinds of "doubleness" that her subject kept in play throughout her life ... Carlisle conveys the fruits of her studies and reflection with a light, sometimes even lyrical touch ... As Clare Carlisle has shown, balancing breadth of knowledge with an emphatic close reading of her subject's life and work, Eliot's greatness - her continuing relevance - needs no special pleading -- Jacqueline Banerjee * Times Literary Supplement *

perceptive and suggestive ... Carlisle ... vividly ... emphasises the astonishing range of Eliot's erudition and traces, in particular, her alignment with a trajectory that leads from Goethe to Hegel, Comte and Darwin ... a richly considered study that brings one close to the heart and mind of a great writer and a wise soul. -- Rupert Christiansen * The Telegraph *

scholarly and thoughtful -- Susie Goldsbrough * The Times *