Mid-Victorian society never forgave George Eliot for setting up home in 1854 with a rackety married man, the journalist and scientist GH Lewes. Late-Victorian society, by contrast, could not forgive her for choosing to wed in church when, following Lewes’s death in 1878, she walked up the aisle with a much younger and duller man called John Cross. On the question of marriage, George Eliot could never seem to get it right.
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, including Maggie Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss and Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch. Carlisle, then, is less concerned with reheating the stale gossip that still gets Eliot’s biographers going – was Lewes unfaithful, why did Cross jump into the Grand Canal during their honeymoon, how come so many people developed a crush on a woman whom Henry James claimed look like a horse? – and instead takes a more soulful look at what “the marriage question” meant for the girl who had been born Mary Anne Evans in 1819.
