“There is something dazzling about marriage,” writes Clare Carlisle at the start of this wonderful book. “That leap into the open-endedness of another human being.” Prof Carlisle knows about such leaps: she is the biographer of madcap Danish sage Søren Kierkegaard, for whom Abraham’s leap of faith in God is the ultimate act of trust, beyond reason or calculation. Marriage could be like that.
George Eliot imagined so. “The very possibility of a constantly growing blessedness in marriage is to me the very basis of good in our moral life,” she wrote to a friend. Happily, Eliot realised that possibility by leaping, as Victorian contemporaries would see it, into a sinful relationship unsolemnised by church or state with the philosopher and journalist George Henry Lewes. Friends snubbed her; beloved brother Isaac didn’t speak to her for 23 years; Queen Victoria read her but wouldn’t stoop to meet this scandalous woman.
