new biography george eliot

George Eliot’s Subversive Vision of Marriage

Unlike Jane Austen, the novelist was most interested in what happens after “I do.”

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“M arriage is so unlike everything else. There is something even awful in the nearness it brings.” George Eliot wrote those sentences in her 1872 masterpiece, Middlemarch , an examination of marriage unmatched by any other. She scrutinized the relationship—its intimate secrets and its public contours—with rare imaginative and moral intensity in her other fiction too. But that fearsome declaration, uttered by her protagonist Dorothea Brooke, stands out. It was meant to disorient a reader, and still does.

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It definitely sounds un-Victorian, framing marriage as the antithesis of a demurely conventional arrangement. Does it sound contemporary? The shudder at suffocation might seem familiar— I need some space . That “awful,” though, isn’t just a way of saying dreadful  ; it surely also means awe-inspiring, which delivers a jolt. Americans may marvel at the romantic spectacle of lavish weddings and wonder at the endurance of an institution that has weathered so many rounds of criticism, calls for redefinition, and diagnoses of crisis. But we appear to be more wary than awed. A quarter of 40-year-olds in the United States (where the surgeon general recently issued an advisory on “our epidemic of loneliness and isolation”) have never been married —a new milestone. Who knows whether they’ll change their mind. To those holdouts—as well as the rest of us—Eliot’s sentences say: Don’t take marriage at face value or assume you understand it.

Eliot’s own marital trajectory was anomalous, and not just by the standards of her time . Marian Evans, as she was known when she arrived in London from the Midlands in 1851 to help edit the liberal journal The Westminster Review , had long despaired that “the bliss of reciprocated affection” was out of reach for the homely, brooding misfit she felt she was. In 1854, soon to turn 35, she eloped to live with a married man, and became a social pariah. Evans called him her “beloved husband,” and George Henry Lewes—editor, biographer, philosopher, critic, scientific writer—called her the “best of Wives,” though he never divorced the legal wife with whom he had three children. Evans credited their “blessed union,” and “the happiness which his love has conferred on my life,” with allowing her to discover “my true vocation, after which my nature had always been feeling and striving uneasily without finding it.” George Eliot was born.

By the time Lewes died, in 1878, Eliot was renowned (thanks in part to his promotional efforts) as a novelist-oracle dispensing wisdom to anchor humanity in a godless cosmos. A year and a half later, now 60, she took the surprising step, in an era when many frowned on second marriages, of getting legally married at last—to a friend and devoted admirer two decades her junior, John Cross. She was dead within eight months. Cross spent the next four years editing and arranging her letters and journals into the pious “autobiography” of a sententious paragon. Scrubbed of all traces of humor and pointed opinion, it was designed, as the Eliot scholar and biographer Gordon S. Haight put it , “to perpetuate the fame of the Victorian Sibyl.” A more subversive Eliot has been struggling to get out ever since.

For several decades , Eliot has been enlisted as a guide in women’s quest for fulfillment in love and work. The biographer and critic Phyllis Rose, in her now-classic Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages (1983), pronounced Eliot and Lewes “my favorite couple.” Her Eliot, dovetailing with second-wave feminism, knew what she wanted and secured it with Lewes: a partner dedicated to loving her, reading and talking constantly with her, writing alongside her, and excelling as the ultimate helpmeet and literary agent. For women critics a generation after Rose, Eliot has supplied quieter encouragement on their paths to emotional and vocational maturity. A decade ago, the New Yorker writer Rebecca Mead, in her memoir My Life in Middlemarch , wrote of returning again and again to the novel , valuing Eliot’s vision of the ongoing growth of a soul. The writer and Harper’s editor Joanna Biggs takes a similar personal approach in A Life of One’s Own: Nine Women Writers Begin Again , out this past spring. She is especially heartened, in the aftermath of her early divorce, by Eliot’s rebirth in her mid-30s.

Read: An interview with Rebecca Mead on what Middlemarch taught her about love, marriage, and journalism

A more unnerving Eliot, drawn to the sometimes-terrifying but also transformative depths of marriage, emerges in a fascinating new biography, The Marriage Question: George Eliot’s Double Life , by Clare Carlisle, a philosophy professor at King’s College London. As her title suggests, Carlisle approaches Eliot’s life and art as a quest to go beyond the most entrenched of marriage plots: the courtship-centered drama, with its happily-ever-after closure, that Jane Austen mastered and that has indelibly marked not just literature but life. For Eliot, “marriage, which has been the bourne of so many narratives,” became a beginning—one in theory without an end, other than death.

Eliot and Lewes read Austen together early in a relationship that hardly fit the comic Austen script. Eliot had just been spurned by the philosopher Herbert Spencer, with whom she had fallen in love (“The lack of physical attraction was fatal,” he later said). Before that, she had been briefly entangled with The Westminster Review ’s young publisher, who already had a wife and a mistress. Lewes, for his part, was in a nonmonogamous marriage that wasn’t going well: His wife also had two children by his best friend, and soon she was pregnant with another. In an 1852 essay for the Review titled “ The Lady Novelists ,” which Eliot assigned and edited, Lewes extolled Austen’s “exquisite art” and called her world “a perfect orb, and vital.” But he also observed that “there are heights and depths in human nature Miss Austen has never scaled nor fathomed, there are worlds of passionate existence into which she has never set foot.”

From the May 1885 issue: Henry James on George Eliot’s life

Four years later, Eliot was poised to give fiction a try, now settled into her “double life, which helps me to feel and think with double strength.” (The pressure was on: In deciding to unite, she and Lewes vowed to support his lawful wife and her many children.) Surveying “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists,” Eliot the critic especially derided the vogue of “oracular” gibberish, fiction that waded into theories of right and wrong, offering pat Christian solutions. Her ideal woman novelist “does not write books to confound philosophers, perhaps because she is able to write books that delight them.” Fortified by Lewes’s faith in her gifts, she was mustering courage to aspire to such a goal.

Indeed, Carlisle credits Eliot with “creating a new philosophical voice” in her fiction as she feels and thinks her way into the most intimate of relationships. Carlisle is an empathetic and ambitious interpreter. She delves beneath the surface of marriage in Eliot’s novels, finding a world that hums with big questions—about “desire, freedom, selfhood, change, morality, happiness, belief, the mystery of other minds.”

Eliot’s genius lay in her acute awareness of how little we reveal to others about what churns inside our heads and hearts—and how little we may perceive about ourselves. As she wrote in her last novel, Daniel Deronda (1876), “There is a great deal of unmapped country within us which would have to be taken into account in an explanation of our gusts and storms.” “It was she,” D. H. Lawrence said, “who started putting all the action inside.”

Carlisle calls attention to just how much of that action in Eliot’s novels transpires in “very dark marital interiors … with their recurring scenes of ambivalence, brutality and disappointment.” The best-known entrant into that shadowed place is vibrantly idealistic Dorothea in Middlemarch , who misjudges pedantic Edward Casaubon so wildly and marries him so quickly. She is devastated to discover his shrunken heart, and instead of “large vistas” in his mind, “winding passages which seemed to lead nowhither.” For other protagonists, “wifely relations” entail a more violent, pathological struggle. Janet Dempster is beaten by her drunken husband and driven to drink herself in Eliot’s debut, Scenes of Clerical Life (1857). In Daniel Deronda , headstrong Gwendolen Harleth is soon haunted by murder fantasies about the cold tyrant, Henleigh Grandcourt, she felt compelled to marry: “That white hand of his which was touching his whisker was capable, she fancied, of clinging round her neck and threatening to throttle her.” She is in turn appalled by her own murderous wish: “My heart said, ‘Die!’—and he sank.”

From the April 1873 issue: A review of George Eliot’s Middlemarch

The contrast between the private agonies of Eliot’s couples and their public displays of composure is striking: Out of pride, they suppress signs of misery at the isolation and subjection that ambush them. The contrast between her characters’ hidden suffering and Eliot’s own radiant marital interior is even starker. In her letters and journal entries, she was effusive in her gratitude for “a life of perfect love and a union that every year makes closer.” She evoked a haven of “thorough moral and intellectual sympathy,” and marveled at “my warm, enthusiastic husband, who cares more for my doing than for his own.”

Pride surely was at work for Eliot too: She chose to flout Church and state, which meant going for years without social invitations, rarely receiving visitors, and being cut off by her brother. She had a stake in saying to anyone who would listen—and in proving to herself and Lewes—that the two of them prized their marriage as a “sacred bond,” legal or not. Why risk embarking openly, as a woman in Britain, on an illicit relationship unless the reward was a loving fidelity, and rare marital equality, that brought “the deepest and gravest joy in all human experience”?

Still, memories of turmoil and loneliness shadowed the idyllic portrayals of what clearly was an exceptional union: a combination of “turbulent, self-critical sensitivity and steady cheerful good sense,” as Carlisle sums up the Eliot-Lewes pairing—plus hard-driving ambition on both sides. Eliot “had not chosen to remain alone for so long,” Carlisle emphasizes, “but all those years without a husband produced a more varied experience of her own heart than most women gained before they married”—and a haunting recognition of how differently things could have gone. Her happiness, after what she referred to as “the long sad years of youth,” was so unexpected, and she had found it in a marriage that ought not to have been possible. In Lewes’s company, Eliot could dare imagine that “all the terrible pain I have gone through in past years has probably been a preparation for some special work that I may do before I die.”

Eliot’s special work lay in giving her characters marital struggles that occasion a “questioning of self and destiny”—something she believed happened too rarely in women’s lives. She resisted simply doling out the tidy fates prescribed for unhappy couples in the conventional Victorian novel’s wedlock plot : spouses wisely reawakened to romantic love (the comic version) or else sundered, having transgressed accepted standards of wifely subservience or master-of-the-house dominance (the tragic version). Eliot wasn’t interested in confirming the prevailing ideal of marriage as a patriarchal, insular bulwark in a troubled world.

She focused instead on inner transformation and growth through the experience of crisis in those desolate marital interiors. Carlisle usefully highlights Eliot’s idea of the “imagined ‘otherwise’ ” as a key to her understanding of how a mind thinks, how a self can be opened to change. By that phrase, as Eliot explains it in Middlemarch , she means the universal human habit of conjuring up alternative possibilities along life’s path—“what if?” visions about the past and future that swirl with mistaken choices, missed chances, suppressed desires.

Eliot understands marriage as a ready incubator of that sort of imagining: It is such a far-reaching commitment, inadequately prepared for by courtship and inevitably subject to unforeseen flux and stress. How could its daily reality—two partners in constant proximity, with competing needs and expectations—not sometimes fuel fantasies of other prospects, both threatening and alluring? Yet escapism isn’t what Eliot has in mind.

From the February 1883 issue: Maria Louise Henry on the morality of Thackeray and of George Eliot

In Middlemarch , she distributes the what-if impulse generously. Her readers are invited to contemplate destinies for her various couples other than the ones that play out: What if, we wonder, Dorothea had not already been engaged to Casaubon when Tertius Lydgate, the idealistic young doctor who looks like a perfect match for her, arrived in town? Or what if Will Ladislaw, Casaubon’s artistic young cousin with “bushy light-brown curls” but “no property, and not well-born,” had won her heart right away? These other fates glimmer like mirages while couples stumble through “pain and weakness and sheer limitation,” as Carlisle writes, and the “unmapped country” within acquires new markers.

Dorothea and Ladislaw unite in the end (after Casaubon’s death), more maturely compassionate for having endured psychic turmoil. Even so, the match stirs comment. In the novel’s finale, the narrator records Dorothea’s friends lamenting that so “rare a creature should have been absorbed into the life of another, and be only known in a certain circle as a wife and mother.” But Eliot telegraphs the error of such a verdict. Dorothea never becomes a wife who feels eclipsed, nor are the Ladislaws what we now call “smug marrieds,” their backs turned to the world. Dorothea, devoted at home, is also quietly but ardently joined with Will, who has been elected to Parliament, in the uphill pursuit of social reform.

Daniel Deronda leaves Gwendolen Harleth facing a far more disconcerting prospect. Unromantic and willful, she resists getting tied down by marriage and at first spurns Grandcourt’s proposal. (“I wonder how girls manage to fall in love,” she says. “It is easy to make them do it in books. But men are too ridiculous.”) Yet sudden family financial troubles change her calculus. She tells herself that at least the supremely aloof Grandcourt won’t crowd her—only to find that she is his captive.

She turns in desperation to Daniel Deronda, a man who possesses “perhaps more than a woman’s acuteness of compassion,” and an imagined otherwise—a sense of much-needed intimacy—starts to take shape in her consciousness. But no rescue awaits, even after Grandcourt abruptly drowns. She learns in the novel’s final pages that Deronda plans to marry someone else and go in quest of a Jewish homeland. Though strengthened by his prediction that she “may live to be one of the best of women,” she has no idea “how that can be.” Gwendolen is alone, “dislodged from her supremacy in her own world” for the first time.

Eliot never aimed to set forth a philosophy of marriage. In her art, she found room for a many-layered, tension-infused conception of it that can feel at once capacious and stifling, daring and intimidating—marriage as a suspenseful adventure and an arduous endeavor. She has a way of leaving her characters, her women especially, with their souls expanded, yet seeming somehow chastened. You would not, in other words, mistake them for Jane Austen characters. Austen’s comic ideal is of “spirited, rights-holding individuals living in social concord,” as the Columbia professor and critic Nicholas Dames has written ; her women—left on the threshold of marriage—thrive and take joy in “the very idea of having a self.” Eliot’s protagonists flourish differently. Their youthful defiance and assertive independence may ebb, but they have been jolted into seeing beyond their own needs, desires, and delusions—into recognizing an “equivalent centre of self” in another person. Marriage, in Eliot’s pages, unfolds as a challenge unlike anything else.

This article appears in the October 2023 print edition with the headline “Life After ‘I Do.’”

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Holy Matrimony

By James Wood

“Literature bores me, especially great literature,” the narrator of one of John Berryman’s “ Dream Songs ” says. George Eliot sometimes bores me, especially the George Eliot draped in greatness. Think of the extremities of nineteenth-century fiction: labile Lermontov; crazy, visionary Melville ; nasty, world-hating Flaubert; mystic moor-bound Brontës; fanatical, trembling Dostoyevsky ; explosive Hamsun. There’s enough wildness to destroy the myth of that stable Victorian portal “classic realism.” It was not classic—certainly not then —and not always particularly “real.” Instead, it was a storm of madness, extravagant allegory, tyrannical ambition, violent religiosity, violent atheism. Amid this tableau, at the calm median of the century’s religious belief and its unbelief, is wise, generous George Eliot: the saintly oracle consulted and visited by young Henry James and many other important admirers (Wagner, Emerson, Turgenev), sitting on her moral throne like a more interesting Queen Victoria (the Queen was, in fact, one of her eager readers), in her distinguished house in Northwest London, named, fittingly, the Priory.

It was this George Eliot whom Virginia Woolf had in mind when she wrote, in 1919, that the long-faced, oracular Victorian had become, for Woolf’s generation, “one of the butts for youth to laugh at.” When George Eliot became respectable, she became very respectable indeed. In the eighteen-seventies, at the height of her career, she received visitors at the Priory on Sunday afternoons. Her devoted husband, George Henry Lewes, who was known to call his wife Madonna and these Sunday audiences “religious services,” bossily hovered and hosted, sometimes drawing guests to his study, where, beneath a portrait of the novelist, her manuscripts were covered, shrinelike, by a curtain. This George Eliot was not only the celebrated author of “ Adam Bede ” (1859), “ The Mill on the Floss ” (1860), and “ Middlemarch ” (1871) but the purveyor of “Wise, Witty and Tender Sayings” (1872), a briskly selling book of extracts from her work compiled and prefaced by a young devotee who thanked her for having “sanctified the Novel by making it the vehicle for the grandest and most uncompromising moral truth.”

Even now, in a world of quite different pieties, it can be difficult to disinter George Eliot from our reverence, to rediscover the writer who had enough radical daring and agnostic courage to take on the whole sniffing righteousness of Victorian England. Clare Carlisle’s eloquent and original book, “ The Marriage Question: George Eliot’s Double Life ” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), allows us to do that, by placing at the center of her inquiry the abiding preoccupation and scandal of George Eliot’s life and work: marriage. In an age that sanctified marriage, George Eliot was nearly the most sublimely married person in the land. In her letters and journals, in the manuscripts she unceasingly dedicated to her husband, she gave thanks for her marital fortune, for the beautifully sympathetic “double life” she shared with George Lewes, a distinguished essayist and thinker in his own right. Her journals describe the tranquillity of their shared days in London, or deep in the English countryside, or travelling in Germany and Italy: mornings reserved for writing, a walk or a museum visit in the afternoon, evenings for reading, often aloud to each other—a strenuous ease she called “a happy solitude à deux.”

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Yet George Eliot wasn’t legally married to George Lewes, who was separated from, but could not divorce, his wife, Agnes Jervis. George Eliot wasn’t always George Eliot, either: she was Marian Evans when she first eloped for the Continent with Lewes, in July of 1854, escaping English judgment for European indifference. Born as Mary Anne Evans in 1819, the same year as the future Queen Victoria, she grew up in the rural Midlands, a settled and conservative region that she would later fictionalize as Loamshire—the stubborn stomach of England, slow to digest politics into action. Her father, whose formal education was basic, was a shrewd and trusted estate manager for an aristocratic Warwickshire family. Mary Anne’s brother, Isaac, apparently as averse to change as his father, succeeded him in the same job. But Mary Anne couldn’t stay put. She was a restless reader who had an aptitude for languages (one of her early crushes was on a private tutor who taught her Italian and German), and she possessed, even as a teen-ager, the kind of scorching, radical austerity that turns intellectuals into prophetic outsiders, a status she awarded to several of her fictional protagonists—Maggie Tulliver, Dorothea Brooke, and Daniel Deronda. The adolescent Mary Anne was herself a fervently pious evangelical, seething with Calvinist fatalism, wary of non-sacred music, and forswearing her attraction to her tutor by quoting a verse from the Book of Isaiah: “Cease ye from man.”

But on Sunday, January 2, 1842, something wondrous and strange occurred. As if the new year demanded from her a new soul, the twenty-two-year-old Mary Anne Evans, who still lived at home as her father’s housekeeper, announced that she would not go to church. In the nineteenth century, there were at least three reliable germs of religious doubt; all three infected some people at once. You might brood over theodicy (how to reconcile God’s supposedly providential goodness with the pain of the world); you might brood over evolution and the long history of the world (this sometimes overlapping with theodicean anxieties, since the long history of the world would appear to be an epic of suffering and extinction); and you might start reading the Bible stories as if they were stories, rather than divine revelation. Mary Anne Evans succumbed to the third illness. Around this time, she read Charles Hennell’s “Enquiry Concerning the Origin of Christianity,” published three years earlier, and concluded that the Biblical accounts of Jesus’ ministry were “histories consisting of mingled truth and fiction.”

The Scriptures might not be divinely authoritative, she told her bewildered father, but there was much about Jesus’ moral teaching that she found admirable. Here was the characteristic overcorrection of the mid-century: a slightly nervous compensation for sudden loss, like overpraising a relative at his funeral. The German scholar David Friedrich Strauss similarly compensates for the loss of God in his immensely influential revaluation of the Biblical narratives, “ The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined ” (1835); Ernest Renan does the same in his popular biography “ The Life of Jesus ” (1863). The air had gone out of the theology, but the moral cushions could still be plumped up. That inflation repelled Nietzsche, who, in “ Twilight of the Idols ” (1889), attacks George Eliot as one of those Victorian moralists who have “got rid of the Christian God, and now feel obliged to cling all the more firmly to Christian morality.”

Renan, a flowery stylist who splashes consoling perfume over Christ’s corpse as he flees, deserves Nietzsche’s hammer. But George Eliot was intensely sincere in both her agnosticism and her moralism. And, more than just sincere, she was strict, searching, systematic, scholarly. She had thought her way into evangelicalism; now she thought her way out of Christian belief. She translated David Strauss in the eighteen-forties. In the early eighteen-fifties, she would translate Ludwig Feuerbach’s “ The Essence of Christianity ” (originally published in German, in 1841), a prescient work in the literature of atheism which argues with a brisk and almost jaunty logic that the love of God is really just the love of man; that we project onto the divine those qualities which we cherish in ourselves. And she read Baruch Spinoza, beginning in the eighteen-forties with the Dutch philosopher’s “ Theological-Political Treatise ” (originally published in 1670) and moving on to the “ Ethics ” (1677), which she arduously translated from the Latin in the mid-eighteen-fifties.

Spinoza was infamous for his sometimes inscrutable variety of pantheism, in which God no longer sits outside Nature, paring his fingernails (James Joyce’s joke), but effectively is Nature, inextricable from it. The supernatural, miracle-working, interventionist God, loaded up with human attributes and projections, slips away into Nature. For all practical religious purposes—prayer, comfort, salvation, immortality—Spinoza kills off God, as many humans would understand the notion. Spinoza was excommunicated by the Jewish community of Amsterdam in 1656, and could probably still get himself excommunicated somewhere today. But he had his own way of compensating for theological lack, and its clearest articulation is to be found in his earlier work the “Theological-Political Treatise.” In that incandescent text, Spinoza argues, among other things, that the Biblical miracles were not miraculous; that divinity is at bottom the moral law; that the essence of that law consists of loving God and loving one’s neighbor; that right living therefore has nothing to do with one’s beliefs or doctrines but is simply a matter of obeying and piously enacting the law; and that this law is divinely inscribed in our hearts. All of which raises the haunting question of whether this universal moral law needs Scripture or the Almighty at all. Does the Good need God—or, rather, “God”? Not for a twentieth-century writer like Iris Murdoch, a novelist who is, in some ways, George Eliot’s nearest intellectual successor, and who writes, “The image of the Good as a transcendent, magnetic centre seems to me the least corruptible and most realistic picture for us to use in our reflections upon the moral life.” George Eliot was always drawn to the magnetic center of the Good. It’s easy to see how appealing this kind of idea might have seemed to an intensely religious, morally provoked, and theologically dispossessed Victorian intellectual, one who was, furthermore, not many years away from attempting to write her own kind of Scripture, Scripture in a different, newer language: the sanctified novel.

This was the writer and thinker who crossed paths with George Lewes, in a Piccadilly bookshop, in 1851: fierce, unrespectable, uninsured. She had arrived in London at the start of that year, had changed her name to Marian, and by the end of it was the de-facto editor of the capital’s leading progressive journal, The Westminster Review . During the next few years, she published there a series of brilliant essays, the most exciting of which belongs in the annals of anti-religious complaint, her decapitation of the evangelical preacher Dr. Cumming, with its devastating opener: “Given, a man with moderate intellect, a moral standard not higher than the average, some rhetorical affluence and great glibness of speech, what is the career in which, without the aid of birth or money, he may most easily attain power and reputation in English society?”

One can forget what a funny satirist George Eliot was. In “Adam Bede,” for instance, the once religious writer, who knew exactly how dreary Sundays could be, tells us that even the farmyard animals appeared to recognize the Sabbath: “The cocks and hens seemed to know it, and made only crooning subdued noises; the very bull-dog looked less savage, as if he would have been satisfied with a smaller bite than usual.” Anyone who has read “Middlemarch” remembers these formidable words about Mr. Casaubon, the parched parson and scholar: “With his taper stuck before him he forgot the absence of windows, and in bitter manuscript remarks on other men’s notions about the solar deities, he had become indifferent to the sunlight.” But funnier and more compact is this addition, several paragraphs later: “ ‘Yes,’ said Mr Casaubon, with that peculiar pitch of voice which makes the word half a negative.” Casaubon, though, is almost avuncular when set alongside the loathsome Henleigh Grandcourt, from “ Daniel Deronda ” (1876). Like Henry James’s Gilbert Osmond, Grandcourt is terrifying in his very calm, “a handsome lizard,” a bully incapable of love who speaks to his abused wife, Gwendolen, in “an adagio of utter indifference.” And he has many dogs: “Grandcourt kept so many dogs that he was reputed to love them.”

Carlisle vividly animates this dangerous writer, and sets before us, in her early chapters, the young woman of letters before she became “George Eliot”—the tyro editor glimpsed, for instance, by a colleague on The Westminster Review, correcting proofs in the evenings, sitting sideways in an easy chair with her legs over the arms, and her long hair over her shoulders. Lewes might have seemed her opposite, at least temperamentally. He was buoyant and confident; she was given to despondency and uncertainty. He was the kind of journalist who could write about anything, and did so; her work has a holy coherence. But, as Marian wrote in a letter, Lewes’s flippancy masked great conscience and heart. And they had shared intellectual and literary interests, particularly in philosophy and contemporary German thought. Like Marian, George Lewes had studied Spinoza with the utmost admiration. In his popular and still very readable “ Biographical History of Philosophy ” (1845-46), Lewes praised Spinoza for creating a body of thought that had been accused for nearly two centuries of the most wicked blasphemy but that had turned out, in the past sixty years, to become “the acknowledged parent of a whole nation’s philosophy,” by which he meant Germany’s.

He and Marian read slightly different Spinozas, Carlisle suggests. Lewes used Spinoza to confirm his atheism, while Marian used him to question her faith. Lewes wrote that Spinoza was not one of those philosophers who “deride or vilify human nature: in his opinion it was better to try to understand it.” Marian would continue to play the serious agnostic to her husband’s unruffled atheist. And perhaps she was always the austere religionist to his worldly humanist. The humanist takes human nature as it comes; the religionist tries to improve it, starting with herself. George Eliot’s novels are full of personal renunciations and reformations. Adam Bede wins the joyous ending of marrying Dinah Morris only by undergoing a moral transformation that earns an authorial blessing churchy enough to sound like something from the marriage service itself: “What greater thing is there for two human souls, than to feel that they are joined for life—to strengthen each other in all labour, to rest on each other in all sorrow, to minister to each other in all pain, to be one with each other in silent unspeakable memories at the moment of the last parting?” Both Rosamond Vincy and Gwendolen Harleth, in “Middlemarch” and “Daniel Deronda,” respectively, learn to become better people by, essentially, wanting less. Carlisle, indeed, offers the rather brilliant insight that the relationship between Dorothea Brooke and her less morally intense sister Celia, in “Middlemarch,” may echo an element of Eliot’s marriage to Lewes: Lewes as Celia, content enough to take reality as it is, and Eliot as Dorothea, impatient to change it.

There were plenty of English Victorians, Christian at least in their self-reckoning, who wanted to improve Marian Evans’s behavior, once the news emerged that she was living with a man who was not her legal husband. Her brother, Isaac, did not communicate with his sister for the next twenty-three years, breaking his silence only after George Lewes’s death, to commend her legal marriage to Lewes’s sapless successor, a banker named John Cross. Twenty-three years represented the heart of Eliot’s literary career, the two decades in which she became the country’s most admired novelist. Even some of those admirers were squeamish. Elizabeth Gaskell, writing to Eliot to praise her work, couldn’t avoid adding, “I wish you were Mrs Lewes . . . still, it can’t be helped.” Eliot and Lewes held their “religious” audiences on Sundays not because they were taking confession but because the business of how to socialize was so tricky: early in their marriage, Eliot decided that she would guard herself against slights by refusing all social invitations. When married men came to the Priory, they almost always came without their wives.

Carlisle, a philosopher who has written studies of Spinoza and Kierkegaard, combines a biographer’s eye for stories with a philosopher’s nose for questions. Her masterly and enriching study is based, I think, on two related premises: that marriage is a private story, about whose intimacies we can only speculate (novels, of course, and George Eliot’s novels preëminently, dramatize those intimacies for us); and that marriage is also a public story, a constantly adjusted fable, the propaganda that a household needs in order to run its little polity. Here are two lives, as James Salter puts it in his novel of marriage, “ Light Years ,” the one people believe you are living, and “the other”: “It is this other which causes the trouble, this other we long to see.” Both narratives, private and public, differently restrict our access, so the ideal historian will need great tact and an impious curiosity. Carlisle has both. Although she carefully builds on the work of scholars and writers like Gordon S. Haight, Rosemary Ashton, Phyllis Rose, and, especially, the subtle investigations of Rosemarie Bodenheimer, she’s unafraid to treat Eliot’s undoubtedly happy, successful marriage as simultaneously a public exercise in happiness and success—and to do so without cynicism.

One of the loveliest things about George Eliot’s life is the calm confidence with which she slays the dragonish norm-keepers of Victorian morality. She wrote to her brother’s lawyer with gentle emphasis: “Our marriage is not a legal one, though it is regarded by us both as a sacred bond.” In one sense, it must have seemed as simple as that. She was blessed to love and be loved by the man she called her husband. The doubters had to catch up. But it could not be quite as simple as that. Carlisle has a very sensitive chapter, for instance, about Eliot’s relation to motherhood. She and Lewes had no children of their own, but Lewes brought with him three sons—Charles, Thornton, and Bertie—from his previous marriage. Eliot was painstakingly sincere in her attentions as stepmother to the boys (who were largely absent, away at boarding school). Playing the right role as mother, Carlisle acutely suggests, would strengthen Eliot’s claim to be Lewes’s wife. She traces the awkward growth of Eliot’s self-appellations. Letters from stepmother were first stiffly signed “Marian Lewes,” then “Mother” (though Eliot enclosed the word in quotation marks), and finally, Teutonically, “Your loving Mutter,” which seemed the best compromise. As far as one can tell, it was a loving and mutually respectful relationship. But Carlisle conveys its fraughtness. Marian Evans was still young enough to bear children of her own when Lewes’s boys entered her life. We know from her journals that menstruation regularly brought headaches, fatigue, and melancholy. (Eliot asterisked her periods.) Perhaps, Carlisle speculates, her periods also brought chagrin, “a reminder of the possibility of motherhood and a premonition of the pain and danger of childbirth.”

Motherhood is a thread that runs darkly through Carlisle’s book, because two of the boys, Thornton and Bertie, would die in their twenties. The Eliot-Lewes household seems to have been able to absorb their young deaths without severe interruption. In 1869, Eliot started writing “Middlemarch”—sparkling, witty episodes—while Thornton was dying in her house. Six years later, in her journals for 1875, she notes Bertie’s death in July (he died far from home, in South Africa), and then almost immediately follows the flat record with: “the 2 first volumes of Daniel Deronda are in print.” Only a few months after this, on January 1, 1876, she summarizes the current state of domestic happiness and looks back on the previous year: “All blessedness except health!” Eliot’s marriage was a kind of public religion, and the religion of her marriage demanded, as Carlisle puts it, growing happiness and ideal love as the best advertisement for her decision to defy the rules of propriety. The marriage was too big to fail. Perhaps, Carlisle boldly muses, “her marriage, and the creative life that was inseparable from it, could not sustain the presence of Thornton and Bertie.” She goes on to conclude that, though there’s no question of Eliot’s devotion to Lewes, it is “devotion to her art . . . that shines most constantly through the pages of her diaries and letters.” Certainly, the married “double life” of Carlisle’s subtitle can be interpreted in more than one way. In order to achieve what she did, she had to live the somewhat clandestine double life of the artist-spy: warm wife in the drawing room, and absolute writer in the study. Her life was a happy “solitude à deux,” but an imperative solitude nonetheless. (In “Middlemarch,” Eliot brilliantly describes Rosamond’s unhappy marriage to Lydgate as “a yoked loneliness.”)

I’m not aware of any other biographical account willing to press this case with quite this force. By centering the religion of marriage, Carlisle usefully allows us to read George Eliot’s peculiar strain of religious agnosticism in its light. Eliot’s religiosity, the thing the spitefully unmarried Nietzsche so hated, was inseparable from the religion of marriage. “The very possibility of a constantly growing blessedness in marriage is to me the very basis of good in our mortal life,” she wrote to a correspondent. Perhaps the magnetic center of the Good was no more and no less than the magnet of marriage? Return to the eloquently calm defense she offered her brother’s lawyer: “Our marriage is not a legal one, though it is regarded by us both as a sacred bond.” It is, Eliot says here, not the letter of the law but the spirit that is sacred. Inwardness is outwardness. That’s George Eliot’s “religion” in a sentence. But which comes first, the belief in the primacy of inwardness or the belief in the intimacy of marriage? Either way, the danger, from the viewpoint of official Victorian Christianity, is that the sacred has been redefined without ecclesiastical warrant. And if the sacred can be thus redefined then everything is up for grabs. This emphasis on inwardness is obviously a kind of Protestantism—in particular, the kind of dissenting spiritual enthusiasm to which all Protestantism inevitably leads. But the sentiment is perfectly compatible with Spinoza’s theological ethics. For Spinoza, the summit of the moral law is charity, loving-kindness, and this moral law is inscribed on our hearts. We prove ourselves moral, then, not by what we profess but by how we live, and therefore by how we love; we will be known by the quality of the marriage that we make with the world, by the moral marriage we make with our neighbors. That is what Spinoza, who was himself unmarried, calls “true religion.” Everything else is hypocrisy and superstition.

So there was the religion of marriage, the religion of Spinoza, and the religion of the novel. That constituted George Eliot’s holy trinity. The novel, after all, was the greatest engine of inwardness in the nineteenth century, the form that represented but also produced a godlessly “sacred” interiority. “We all have a better guide in ourselves,” Jane Austen’s Fanny Price says, “if we would attend to it, than any other person can be.” Or than any God can be? George Eliot has Adam Bede voice what is almost a commonplace of the nineteenth-century novel when he says that “real religion” is not doctrines (what he calls “notions”) but feelings: “It isn’t notions sets people doing the right thing—it’s feelings.” Throughout the nineteenth century, we find the novelist waging war with hypocrisies and doctrines, religious and social, and often with the civil law that ritualistically enacts them, on behalf of the particularity and saving inwardness of the stubbornly individual fictional character. You could say that the nineteenth-century novel is so full of complicated “characters” precisely because they are so furiously resisting a society that simplifies them. Women, of course, were most obviously menaced by society’s simplifications. “We don’t ask what a woman does—we ask whom she belongs to,” Philip Wakem’s father announces in “The Mill on the Floss.” For the novelist, the natural habitat of these resistant women was marriage. And, as the century progressed, the thing they were resisting became marriage itself.

As a storyteller, Eliot plots for marriage; it drives all her major novels. But, inevitably, happy, ideal marriages are barely represented in her pages. Adam Bede marries Dinah Morris in a brief, formulaic coda, entitled “Marriage Bells.” In “The Mill on the Floss,” Maggie Tulliver (a kind of authorial self-portrait), torn between a marriage of minds with the physically deformed Philip Wakem and a marriage of bodies with the dashing Stephen Guest, is granted neither, and dies chastely in the arms of her brother, Tom. In “Middlemarch,” Dorothea Brooke first marries the wrong man (Casaubon), then strenuously fights her way into a happy marriage with the right one, the handsome young radical thinker Will Ladislaw. But her journey takes the length of the entire novel, and is summarized only in a quick, again largely formulaic, epilogue. Likewise, Daniel’s morally ideal marriage to Mirah Lapidoth is the barely glimpsed solution at the very end of “Daniel Deronda,” not part of the book’s lived texture. In all these cases, the heroic marriages are heroic finales, existing outside the structure of the community that produced them or outside the structure of the novel that plotted them, and sometimes both. They can be given no more flesh and blood than Jane Austen awards Elizabeth Bennet’s fairy-tale bliss with Darcy on the last page of “ Pride and Prejudice .”

Of course, novelists aren’t interested in happy marriages but in unhappy ones—happiness writes white, and so on. Readers of Eliot vividly remember the unhappy marriages: Casaubon and Dorothea, Rosamond and Lydgate, Gwendolen and Grandcourt. Still, it’s a tantalizing idea that Eliot idealized happy marriage so powerfully that she could hardly bear to explore its actualities on the page; as Austen makes marriage an almost unrepresentable romantic utopia, Eliot makes marriage an almost unrepresentable moral utopia. Nowhere is the gap between unhappy actuality and holy fantasy, between flesh and spirit, more acute than in her last great novel, “Daniel Deronda” (1876), that strange, fantastical, sometimes boring, and utterly compelling book. “Daniel Deronda” turns on two marriages, one vividly recorded and one postponed until the last pages of the book. The “real” marriage is the vicious failure, the differently yoked loneliness of Gwendolen and Grandcourt’s union; she marries cynically and in desperation, for money, and has the misfortune to marry an exquisitely talented bully. Meanwhile, Daniel Deronda, an Englishman of uncertain parentage who magically turns out to be a Sephardic Jew, spends the length of the novel on a quest both for his identity and for his ideal mate, Mirah, a Jewish refugee of great beauty, physically and spiritually. Indeed, we can see Deronda as a kind of successful Casaubon, a worldly seeker who finds his Key to all Mythologies at the religious source: in Judaism. The “real” marriage in the novel is full of brutal materialities, formidably brought to life; the “unreal” marriage floats away into the ether, compacted into a brief epilogue of slightly more than three pages. Daniel is dreamily seen as Mirah’s “rescuing angel”; Mirah can think of life with Daniel only in Eliot’s highest terms, as that “which she could call by no other name than good.” The marriage is almost immaterial. It can’t quite be imagined in an actual England: the couple are about to set out for “the East.” The Good calls them; the magnetic center is elsewhere.

Eliot would have known better than to poke the long, exploratory fingers of the novel into the thing she had with Lewes. Perhaps the great fortune of her marriage, illegal but sacred, seemed so miraculous and undeserved that she felt as if she were holding her breath for twenty-four years? We can say with decent confidence that George Eliot’s marriage to George Henry Lewes realized, insofar as any worldly union can, the Good, here and now and not elsewhere: together they forged a brazier of love, and warmed themselves at its flame. Devotion to writing may indeed shine most vividly in Eliot’s correspondence and journals, but it did not displace marital devotion. Perhaps it even augmented it. Carlisle is struck by the “quality of devotion” that runs through the marriage, and writes movingly about its entailments: “It is attention given, work done, tasks shared, disappointments borne, anger endured, quarrels forgiven, loss grieved.”

In this spirit, Eliot wrote a remarkably beautiful and tender epigraph for the last chapter—the marriage coda—of “Daniel Deronda”: “In the chequered area of human experience the seasons are all mingled as in the golden age: fruit and blossom hang together; in the same moment the sickle is reaping and the seed is sprinkled; one tends the green cluster and another treads the wine-press. Nay, in each of our lives harvest and spring-time are continually one, until Death himself gathers us and sows us anew in his invisible fields.” She published these words in 1876. What did she already apprehend? Two years later, Death would gather her dear husband, a man about whom one of her admirers wrote, “The secret of his lovableness was that he was happy in being kind.” ♦

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A Wider Devotion

November 2, 2023 issue

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George Eliot; drawing by Frederick William Burton, 1864

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The Marriage Question: George Eliot’s Double Life

A savage, drunk, bullying husband (a pillar of his society) who has abused his wife and pushed her out of doors in her nightgown and bare feet on an icy winter night is having a terminal attack of delirium tremens. He thinks she’s coming at him in the form of giant snakes:

“Let me go, let me go,” he said in a loud, hoarse whisper; “she’s coming….she’s cold….she’s dead….she’ll strangle me with her black hair. Ah!” he shrieked aloud, “her hair is all serpents….they’re black serpents….they hiss….they hiss….let me go….let me go….she wants to drag me with her cold arms….her arms are serpents….they are great white serpents….they’ll twine round me….she wants to drag me into the cold water….her bosom is cold….it is black….it is all serpents.”

A cold, self-gratifying gentleman who has married a young, beautiful wife (she needs money and status) in a cynical bargain so that he can show her off, humiliate her, and torture her forces her compliance so that she becomes as frightened of a quarrel with him “as if she had foreseen that it would end with throttling fingers on her neck.” A selfish, hedonistic charmer who at first enthralls his innocent, trusting wife with his beauty and promises turns out to be a cheat, a spy, a bigamist, and a swindler. Their mutual attraction turns to disappointment and repulsion, and he becomes the husband from whom “she felt her soul revolting.” An idealistic, ambitious young doctor in a provincial town marries the wrong person out of an impulse of pity, tenderness, and attraction, and finds himself shackled to an unimaginative, self-regarding, and childish woman who frustrates all his aspirations and wrecks his life. In later life he calls her his basil plant—and when “asked for an explanation, said that basil was a plant which had flourished wonderfully on a murdered man’s brains.”

These gruesome examples—and there are others—of appalling marriages in George Eliot’s fiction (taken, respectively, from “Janet’s Repentance” in Scenes of Clerical Life , Daniel Deronda , Romola , and Middlemarch ) were invented by a woman who took the greatest possible risk in her own lifelong relationship and was rewarded, it seems, by happiness, fulfillment, security, and creative encouragement. True, there are some good, noble, steady marriages in her novels (notably, and beautifully, the Garths in Middlemarch ), but they are definitely in the minority. Eliot’s imaginative attraction to violently cruel and thwarting marriages, in contrast with her personal investment in a trustful, lasting intimacy, is a fascinating paradox that Clare Carlisle’s interesting book sets out to investigate.

Marian Evans fell in love with the remarkable journalist, scientist, philosopher, and self-made man George Henry Lewes in her early thirties, when she had already become a journalist and literary editor, “a woman of letters,” but before she became “George Eliot.” Lewes was disastrously married—after having four sons with him, his wife had several children by his best friend—and, for complicated reasons, couldn’t get divorced. Evans, as well as being an ambitious woman of exceptional intellectual and creative powers, was also an unconfident and emotional person, “bruised and insecure” and marked by a painful childhood. She had lifelong bouts of serious depression. She suffered from lack of confidence in her work even after her great successes. She longed for intimacy and was terrified of rejection. A phrenologist noted her high level of “adhesiveness”: she was “always requiring someone to lean upon.”

Before she fell in love with Lewes she had already thrown herself into some intense friendships with women and some unsatisfactory passions for men (the philosopher Herbert Spencer, for instance). Carlisle sees “devotion” as one of the keys to her life: the need to be devoted to a soulmate and to have that person be devoted to her, but, beyond that, devotion to her art, through which she makes felt the human need for devotion to others, to a task in life, and to the wider world.

In 1854, when she was thirty-four, she made the bold decision to commit herself to Lewes as wife all but legally (though she insisted on being addressed as “Mrs. Lewes”) and to spend her life working and living with him. They were an odd, caricaturable couple: he ebullient, sociable, tiny, and strikingly ugly, she quiet, grave-looking, and withdrawn; he all surface, she all depth. Their relationship went against every convention of the age, resulting in total alienation from her family, exclusion from large sections of British (though not European) society, and a distancing from some close friends. The news of their deciding to live together provoked huge amounts of gossip. For a while, Carlisle writes, “it seemed as if the finest Victorian minds were occupied with her sex life.”

The relationship also kick-started her entire career as a novelist, which began, with his encouragement, only after she started living with Lewes and ended with his death. One of the endearing features of their “marriage” was its strength as a working partnership. There are many nice accounts here of their days working together in a steady routine, “like two secluded owls,” “writing or studying in the mornings, walking in the afternoons, reading together in the evenings.” They often collaborated, and in every aspect of her professional life—relations with her publishers and her public, financial matters, reviews, serializations—Lewes promoted, managed, and protected her.

The phrase “double life” used in a book on George Eliot would usually apply to the double identity of Marian Evans (or Lewes) and “George Eliot,” as when Carlisle talks of Eliot’s bringing together “the two parts of herself.” She shows us her subject as intensely conscious of her double life as writer and woman, at one time keeping a diary with the front part recording events in the life of Mrs. Lewes and the back pages recording her authorial achievements. In old age Eliot (as Carlisle refers to her as a writer) described her creative life as her “higher life” “that is young and grows, though in my other life I am getting old and decaying.”

But “double life” in this biography has a double meaning. It also refers to her coexistence with Lewes, which George Eliot called “a shared life, a double life,” describing their inseparable intimacy as “a sort of Siamese-twin condition” or, more ominously, a “dual egotism.” When she adopted her pseudonym in 1857 in order to write fiction without being judged as a woman, she chose her first name not only in tribute to George Sand but as a mark of her connection to George Lewes.

Carlisle focuses her version of George Eliot’s life on that remarkable connection. She starts with a disquisition on marriage in general and often—possibly too often—ponders long relationships: how little we know about them from the outside, what it means to live together over many years, why we are so curious about other people’s marriages. “At times marriages, like nations and churches, survive by policing their borders against threats to their stability.” “Voice and touch are the medium of a marriage…. Partners save for one another the softest and sharpest tones that belong only to shared life.”

Her book begins on the day Marian Evans and George Lewes leave England together and ends with the extraordinary coda of Evans’s brief legal marriage, after Lewes’s death, to their close friend, the much younger John Cross. Cross, an emotional, nervous, and dedicated late-life husband, is famous for two things: jumping out of the hotel window in Venice on their honeymoon, and turning himself into her faithful biographer after her death. Carlisle doesn’t caricature Cross—she never makes fun of her subjects—but reflects on how the long cohabitation with Lewes shaped George Eliot’s life and writing, and how the brief marriage to Cross shaped her afterlife.

Given this emphasis on her adult relationships, Marian Evans’s childhood, family history, and early life are introduced not at the start of the book, but only when they are needed in relation to the novels. And a great deal of commentary—on historical and social context, on previous biographical versions—is banished to the footnotes. These decisions give the book a clear shape and a fast pace but mean that some crucial early features are played down, such as Marian Evans’s youthful religious fervor and her relationships with her father and brother.

Carlisle is more fascinated by the disconnect between the painful marriages in the novels and the devoted relationship with Lewes. She does suggest, warily, that there might be facets of their relationship that account for the dark side of marriage in the fictions. But she is scrupulously inconclusive about this. We’re all familiar with restitutional biographies that right the wrongs and reveal the hidden story of the wife or partner of a famous male writer—Ellen Ternan, Mrs. Meredith, George Yeats, Vivienne Eliot, more recently the first Mrs. Orwell are notable examples—or with books about famous women writers whose husbands are found guilty of coercion, cruelty, or overmanagement (step forward T.S. Eliot, Leonard Woolf, John Middleton Murry, and Ted Hughes, among others). As a biographer Carlisle is careful and ruminative rather than trailblazing or defensive. She doesn’t go in for blaming and shaming but picks her way delicately through the story.

There are moments when Lewes comes across—to us and to others—as bossy, exhibitionist, greedy, and possessive. He was candid himself about having encouraged Eliot to write fiction because they needed the money: “We were very badly off,” he recalled, so he told her to “try a story. We may get 20 guineas for it from Blackwood and that would be something.” When Eliot gave him total control over her authorial income, Carlisle ventures: “Perhaps this was Lewes’s idea, and she acquiesced with mixed feelings.” When she left the faithful Blackwood, temporarily, for rival publisher George Smith with a big offer for the serialization of Romola , Blackwood attributed it to “the voracity of Lewes.”

Carlisle goes as far as suggesting that the seedy, grasping, controlling character of the Jewish gambler Lapidoth in Daniel Deronda might be enacting the “shadow side” of the relationship with Lewes. And money management is not the only area of overcontrolling behavior. Lewes prevented her from going to visit her dying sister. He stopped all letters about, and reviews of, her latest work from reaching her: “No one speaks about her books to her, but me; she sees no criticisms.” After she became famous, he stage-managed their salons as if the guests were approaching a “shrine.” Several acquaintances found him unbearable; one new friend, whose wife was developing an intense friendship with Eliot, remarked, “It is rather unfortunate that they are so inseparable.”

Carlisle is good at noticing the class attitudes toward them both, which were often snobbish and condescending. Lewes was regarded by some patrician friends (such as Charles Eliot Norton) as a vulgar upstart; George Eliot on her pedestal of fame attracted jealous comments about her “peasant” roots. But the feeling of being outsiders was part of their bond. The book shows unsparingly how that bond could result in ruthless joint behavior. Their treatment of Lewes’s younger sons, sent off to South Africa to trade and farm with catastrophic results; their “erasing” of Lewes’s wife, Agnes, from “the family narrative”; and their closing of ranks against at least one of Eliot’s close women friends are all treated as somewhat sinister displays of their “dual egotism.”

But, in the main, this is a heartening story of profound understanding, of support and mutual trust. Carlisle is moved by the moral seriousness of their commitment to each other. As Eliot repeatedly said, whenever she was challenged about it: “If there is any one action or relation of my life which is and always has been profoundly serious, it is my relation to Mr Lewes.”

A professor of philosophy, Carlisle aims to turn George Eliot’s real and fictional marriages into an examination of her philosophy of life. She maintains that “marriage is rarely treated as a philosophical question” and wants to fill this gap by asking, “How could marriage be a site for philosophy, even a path towards knowledge?” She is looking for places in the fiction where “the marriage question grows metaphysical” and approaches through that same question Eliot’s understanding, in her books, of morality, human experience, love, responsibility, and social relations.

Alan Cook Collection

South Farm, George Eliot’s birthplace, Nuneaton, Warwickshire, England

This means that, biographically and critically, Carlisle is putting all her eggs in one basket, which can make for some straining. To argue that George Eliot wrote grand, epic novels like Middlemarch because the marriage question is such a big and complex one is to overlook all that novel’s other components. And marriage is not the central theme of all the books. What about work, reputation, beliefs, professional decisions, communities, democracy, power, progress, to name only a few of their other concerns?

Naturally Carlisle makes much of George Eliot’s knowledge and reading of philosophy, which was such an important part of her intellectual life and so powerfully informed the novels. Plenty has been written about her reading of, and in some cases translating, the great European thinkers: Goethe, Feuerbach, Spinoza, Comte, Spencer, Hegel. But Carlisle gives a useful introduction to these influences, noting especially how often they came to George Eliot through Lewes and were part of their shared thinking. Feuerbach’s belief in human love as natural and sacred, above “narrow Christian moralism” (as Carlisle puts it), influenced her own behavior and choices. Spinoza’s demonstration in his Ethics that “our lives are thoroughly interconnected, always parts of larger wholes,” his belief in “joy” as the result of understanding our fluctuating emotions, and his contention that human beings are united “by a great need of friendship” profoundly affected her.

George Eliot’s reading of Goethe (especially Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship ) and of Ruskin helped to develop her central belief that artists should take on the “sacred task” of “truthfully portraying the lives of ordinary people.” The idea that “milieu” and “environment” shape our inner lives—derived from Comte, Spencer, Darwin, and Cuvier and leading, in the 1850s, to the new science of sociology—can be seen enacted in The Mill on the Floss . Daniel Deronda is described here as using its personal plots of marriage and self-discovery to demonstrate the Kabbalistic “mystical vision” of the interdependency of souls. While Middlemarch is coming into being, Lewes is writing on Hegel’s philosophy as an investigation of “the general relation between the Cosmos and the thinking mind,” and Middlemarch is read through the lens of Hegel’s description of “a world of relations.”

Quite apart from showing what a staggering amount of reading George Eliot did for her fiction—even the encouraging Lewes thought she was doing “too much research” for her fifteenth-century Florentine novel about Savonarola, Romola , and he was right—this philosophical approach provides a clear guide to the workings of the novelist’s mind.

Carlisle is especially sensitive to George Eliot’s treatment of the dark places of the human mind: women’s self-doubt and self-questioning, the attractions of asceticism and self-sacrifice, the entanglement of love and fear, the hard link between love and pain, as Felix (in Felix Holt, the Radical ) teaches Esther Lyon (“It is not true that love makes all things easy: it makes us choose what is difficult”), and the agonizing need of joy in those who have never experienced it, like poor Romola crying out, “I am very thirsty for a deep draught of joy.”

When “George Eliot” was exposed as Mrs. Lewes in 1859, her fellow novelist Elizabeth Gaskell wrote to congratulate her on Adam Bede and The Mill on the Floss , though voicing reservations about her personal life—Gaskell was, after all, the wife of a Unitarian minister. Carlisle quotes her letter as expressing “tolerance, if not wholehearted acceptance: ‘I wish you were Mrs Lewes…still, it can’t be helped.’” This (with apologies for the Casaubon-like pedantry) is an unusual small slip on Carlisle’s part. In fact the letter reads: “I wish you were Mrs Lewes. However that can’t be helped, as far as I can see, and one must not judge others.” It matters, because Gaskell is saying here exactly what Carlisle describes as George Eliot’s central tenet in life, which Carlisle adopts as her own admirable biographical principle: “It is not at all obvious that we are entitled to make moral judgments about these people, whose inner lives we only glimpse from afar”; “I will not try to weigh up these shared lives according to some scale of good and bad, right and wrong.”

That is what we gain from the novels—and it is a wider philosophy than a consideration of the nature and meaning of marriage. George Eliot described herself not as a teacher but as “a companion in the struggle for thought.” Carlisle quotes that phrase when commenting on the lovely moment near the end of Middlemarch when Celia says to her sister, Dorothea, that she is completely baffled by how the relationship with Will Ladislaw has come about, and Dorothea tells her she can’t explain it: “You would have to feel with me, else you would never know.”

That, says Carlisle, is George Eliot’s “message to her readers.” We hear that message when her characters break through from their own personal, often marital problems to a sense of the wider sufferings of humanity, which we need to enter into and be aware of, rather than judging. Dorothea, after a night of personal anguish, looks out of the window and sees people going to work: “And she felt the largeness of the world and the manifold wakings of men to labour and endurance. She was a part of that involuntary, palpitating life.” Romola realizes she has to transfer her emotional needs from the personal realm toward the sufferings of the many:

All that ardour of her nature which could no longer spend itself in the woman’s tenderness for father and husband, had transformed itself into an enthusiasm of sympathy with the general life. She had ceased to think that her own lot could be happy—had ceased to think of happiness at all: the one end of her life seemed to her to be the diminishing of sorrow.

George Eliot thinks that suffering is what we have to accept, but that it can be “transformed” into something creative, useful, and consoling. The essential thing—in marriage and beyond it—is to understand the kinship among people, without passing judgment. Lydgate takes this, memorably, as the meaning of Dorothea’s appeal to him for help and advice when her husband Casaubon falls ill:

For years after Lydgate remembered the impression produced in him by this involuntary appeal—this cry from soul to soul, without other consciousness than their moving with kindred natures in the same embroiled medium, the same troublous fitfully-illuminated life.

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US EDITION OF THE WORLD’S OLDEST MAGAZINE

An admirable but flawed new biography of George Eliot

The Marriage Question shows us a woman fragmented

Written By:

Oliver Soden

What to call her? The question troubled George Eliot, and challenges Clare Carlisle, her latest biographer. Even this book’s indexer plays along, providing more than one entry for its shapeshifting but steadfast subject. The Marriage Question shows us a woman fragmented, attempting to understand in her various existences how — and if — personal freedom can be achieved when your life is bound to another.

Mary Ann (or Anne) Evans was born in Warwickshire, in the West Midlands of England, in 1819. On moving to London in 1850, hoping to make her living as a writer, she became…

What to call her? The question troubled George Eliot, and challenges Clare Carlisle, her latest biographer. Even this book’s indexer plays along, providing more than one entry for its shapeshifting but steadfast subject.  The Marriage Question   shows us a woman fragmented, attempting to understand in her various existences how — and if — personal freedom can be achieved when your life is bound to another.

Mary Ann (or Anne) Evans was born in Warwickshire, in the West Midlands of England, in 1819. On moving to London in 1850, hoping to make her living as a writer, she became Marian Evans. In her thirties she met and fell in love with the philosopher and critic George Henry Lewes, who — pitted with smallpox scars but energetic and humorous — was already married with children. The expense and scandal of divorce was unthinkable, but by 1854 Eliot and Lewes had decided to live together as husband and wife, maintaining their relationship despite the gossip and censure of society. She insisted on being referred to as Marian Lewes, although her new love called her Polly or, on occasion, Madonna. Lewes’s four sons, holding the word “mother” at one remove, wrote to her in German as “mutter.”

Married all but legally, she began to write fiction under the name George Eliot, beginning tentatively with  Scenes of Clerical Life   in 1857 and then finding success with her first full-length novel,  Adam Bede . After that came undeniable greatness:  The Mill on The Floss ,  Silas Marner , above all,  Middlemarch . Few of Eliot’s biographers waste time on the 400-page poem  The Spanish Gypsy   or her most political book,  Felix Holt , but Carlisle lingers over what might be called the “problem” novels,  Romola   and  Daniel Deronda .

George Eliot’s identity soon became public knowledge, the curtain pulled back to reveal Marian Evans — but who, by then, was that? “That individual,” wrote Lewes to a friend, “is extinct, rolled up, mashed, absorbed in the Lewesian magnificence!” Egotism aside, his is a striking vocabulary, half-violent, half-culinary, describing a pulping of selfhood (Dickens uses “mashed” for descriptions of mud and murder, as well as potatoes). The crux of Eliot’s “marriage question” is that immersion in another, to the point of self-obliteration, strengthened and defined her own identity. With Lewes she led not a double but a single life in which two souls were merged — or mashed — in what she called a “shared solitude.”

Carlisle goes so far as to call the relationship a “crisis from which [Eliot] never recovered”; certainly the loss of social status, and the censoriousness of friends and family, caused her considerable pain. But Eliot described life with Lewes as “the gravest joy.” Joy, for her, was a serious matter. “I think it is impossible,” she wrote, “for two human beings to be more happy in each other.” (Did Virginia Woolf read this letter, and catch its echo in her suicide note? “I don’t think two people could have been happier than we have been.”) Eliot’s use of “in” is telling: she and Lewes lived not with but within one another. Her pseudonym took on his forename. When he died, in 1878, she revised for publication his final work, and so published sentences of her own as George Henry Lewes. The absorption had become total. Carlisle brilliantly notices how, in the diary entries made from the depths of a widow’s grief, Eliot dispensed with the pronoun “I” — “finished second reading,” “revised introduction” — a person unselved.

At sixty, she married again, or rather for the first time: to John Cross, an acolyte over twenty years younger, to whom she had once signed herself “Auntie.” Mary Ann Cross, as she now was, had a new nickname from a new partner: Beatrice, from Dante. The “I” returned to her diary. Her life as Mrs. Cross is passed over briefly here, though its mysteries still intrigue. Honeymooning with his wife in Venice, seven months before her death, Cross threw himself from a balcony into the Grand Canal. He survived to become the gatekeeper of his wife’s legacy, never explaining his attempted flight from his own marriage question.

Defined, and made herself, by the men she loved, Eliot is little like the twenty-first-century ideal of the free woman. Her marriage to Lewes was unconventional in its adherence to convention. He provided her with the life and love from which her novels sprang, but her considerable earnings went into his bank account and, protectiveness bleeding into control, he was not above opening her mail or denying her a holiday. Carlisle rightly refuses to wrench her into modern shapes, just as she refuses to admonish, gossip or judge. This study is nothing so modish or crude as  How George Eliot Saved My Marriage ; as Woolf said of  Middlemarch , it is a book written for grown-up people. A professor of philosophy at King’s College London, Carlisle intertwines a chronological account of the relationship with literary analysis concentrating on Eliot’s deep knowledge of philosophy. These strands are then braided into a rumination on marriage; what it meant to Eliot, to her time and to ours.

Carlisle’s is a formidable distillation of material, quoting generously from letters in a narrative at once economical and spacious. Focusing all but exclusively on the quarter-century of Eliot’s life spent with Lewes, she can proceed with stimulating detail, chronicling their shared existence of travel, industry and sickliness. Carlisle’s Eliot is human and contradictory. She speaks, in the beautiful low voice that she shared with Dorothea Brooke of  Middlemarch  — a voice that, in combination with radiant intelligence, animated her large nose and crooked teeth into something not far from beauty. She lolls, correcting proofs with her legs hooked over the arm of a chair. She kisses, perhaps reluctantly, perhaps not, the young women who, at the peak of her fame, worshipped her with evidently sexual ardor. She bleeds, marking her menstrual cycle with asterisks in her diary.

She also, of course, writes. Here, Carlisle at once illumines and occludes. She is strong not only on what happens in  Middlemarch  but on what doesn’t, showing us a plot rich with shadow lives, might-have-beens, what-ifs. Her knowledge of Eliot’s knowledge provides an intellectual route map for the novels by charting the “towers of books” that went into their creation, and she valuably demonstrates that Eliot, translator of Spinoza and of David Strauss, was at the vanguard of European philosophical thought.

But just as  Romola , set in fifteenth-century Florence, may be said to collapse under the weight of its own learning, something similar happens here. Characters in fiction become walking, talking philosophical arguments, squeezed into shapes: “When Romola de’ Bardi marries handsome, hedonistic Tito Melema she plunges into the condition dramatized in Plato’s cave.” (Strangely, given the book’s focus, the analysis of  Romola  pays scant attention to Tito’s two wives, the result of a mock “marriage” to a fourteen-year-old with whom he fathers children raised by the heroine as her own.) The sisters of  Middlemarch , Dorothea and Celia Brooke, are cast as Aristotle and Plato. I once wrote a bad student essay casting them as John Ruskin and Walter Pater. The point is that they are Dorothea and Celia Brooke, given contradictory and breathing life by Eliot’s novelistic rather than her philosophical genius.

And so to the book’s eponymous and overarching concern: the marriage question. Here, and inexplicably, Carlisle descends into muddy platitude, never managing to formulate what this question might be, even as she strives for an answer. Her chief conclusion is taken from Spinoza, as filtered through Eliot: “Being free does not mean being autonomous or self-sufficient.” But she clutters her chapters with her own thoughts on marriage that wither in the glare of her subject’s penetrating eloquence. Fridge-magnet aphorisms read like Eliot parody: “At times marriages, like nations and churches, survive by policing their borders.” “Like a plant, a long-term relationship has its phases of development.” “The world is full of couples, like it is full of houses.” Late on, Carlisle riskily decides to introduce some unexpected figures, from Princess Diana to her editor. “When he reaches [Eliot’s decision to marry Cross], my editor is shocked.” More disquieting are the frequent faux-profundities: “art stretches across human history,” or “religion, we know, is far from peaceful,” or “all creatures… are shaped by their surroundings.”

Eliot’s truths are more than clichéd epigram or extended simile. She didn’t write in themes or even in thoughts. Whether inspired by Hegel or Plato, her philosophical explorations are digested by the enzyme of fiction — maybe more so than Carlisle allows. The stuff of her writing is words, what in  Adam Bede  she calls the “drop of ink at the end of my pen.” Words were her chosen means of expressing her “keen vision and feeling for all that is ordinary in human life,” which the narrator of  Middlemarch  describes as a fatally unsustainable surfeit of impression, likened to “hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat.” Somewhere along the way in Carlisle’s often admirable book, Eliot’s keen and specific vision is blurred by the high-flown. This is a macroscopic study of one who specializes in microscopy.

Eliot’s most disturbing fictional marriage is in  Daniel Deronda . Carlisle’s virtuosic account of this last, proto-Zionist, novel’s “kabbalistic composition” shows us Eliot learning Hebrew with the scholar Emanuel Deutsch; reading the philosopher Auguste Comte; making notes on Jewish mysticism and reading lectures by the physicist John Tyndall. She mentions, too, a scene in which Eliot’s almost-heroine, Gwendolen Harleth, breakfasts with a husband she neither likes nor loves. Gwendolen is eating prawns, which Carlisle sees as evidence of an “invisible flow of money from distant colonies.” (She does not go the whole hog and record Eliot’s pleasure on hearing that children’s books by her friend Cara Bray had reached India: “I enjoy thinking that the little darkies in Hindustan will be the better for the work of your dear fair head.”)

But you will not find the moment when Gwendolen picks up a prawn and thinks the “boiled ingenuousness of its eyes” entirely preferable to the dead-eyed stare of her husband. Eliot’s novels are full of eyes. In  Middlemarch  both Casaubon and Dorothea are shortsighted; eyes or eyeglasses appear eleven times in  Deronda ’s opening chapter alone. She was intent upon eye-opening, urging her characters and readers to see better. Her most profound answer to the marriage question can be glimpsed in the eyes of that prawn, in life as on the page no bigger than a drop of ink.

This article was originally published in  The Spectator ’s October 2023 World edition. 

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George Eliot’s marriage plot

In her work, the novelist developed a radical philosophy of relationships. In her life, she put it into practice.

By Anna Leszkiewicz

“Something should be done,” George Eliot wrote to her publisher in 1874, “in the matter of literary biography.” She had read John Forster’s life of Charles Dickens and found it a troubling experience. “Is it not odious that as soon as a man is dead his desk is raked, and every insignificant memorandum which he never meant for the public is printed for the gossiping amusement of people too idle to reread his books?” The genre is “a disgrace to us all”, the literary equivalent of “the uncovering of the dead Byron’s club-foot”.

Elsewhere she condemned the form as “a disease”. Eliot was at this stage a famous novelist in the last decade of her life – we might read her comments as revealing anxieties about the prospect of her own biography . (Of course, there is an irony in reading these “insignificant memoranda” – which protest loudly but ineffectually at their publication – at all.) Did she dread a hungry-eyed writer rifling through her own desk, combing for material for a scandalous biography of Mary Anne Evans, or Marian Lewes, or Mary Ann Cross – thus undermining George Eliot, the carefully constructed persona who wrote Middlemarch? “Any influence I have as an author,” she wrote in 1876, “would be injured by the presentation of myself in print through any other medium than that of my books.”

Eliot’s fear was unfounded: the dozens of biographies that have been written about the author have not rocked her reputation as one of the greatest novelists in the English language. But while sympathetic, they have not all been flattering. Eliot is often cast as a rather pathetic figure in her youth – lonely, ugly, desperate for a partner – until she meets the love of her life, George Henry Lewes, who saves her not just from spinsterhood but obscurity, enabling her to write.

Her early biographer Mathilde Blind describes Eliot’s “plain” face, “prominent under-lip” and “massive jaw”. (Such comments were not limited to her biographers: Dickens thought her one half of “the ugliest couple in London”.) The Victorians were struck by her big, “masculine” head residing on a “feminine” body – multiple biographers reference a phrenologist’s claim that Eliot’s skull showed she was “not fitted to stand alone” but needed “someone to lean upon”. Blind sees Eliot as victim of her “clinging, womanly nature”, whose “dormant faculties were roused” by Lewes. Gordon Haight’s biography from the mid 20th century repeats the phrenologist’s phrases.

Some later biographers, such as Phyllis Rose in Parallel Lives, have pushed against “the myth of George Eliot’s dependency” as incompatible with the daring independence of her literary imagination. Virginia Woolf caught these contradictions when she pictured Eliot as “despondent, reserved, shuddering back into the arms of love as if there alone were satisfaction and, it might be, justification” but “at the same time reaching out with ‘a fastidious yet hungry ambition’ for all that life could offer the free and inquiring mind”.

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Claire Carlisle’s The Marriage Question: George Eliot’s Double Life offers no new information on a life already so well mined, but explores these conflicts, and Eliot’s relationship with Lewes, in a philosophical context. (Her title comes from a line in Eliot’s letters: “How happy I am in this double life which helps me to feel and think with double strength.”) Carlisle, a philosophy professor at King’s College London, laments that “our marriage questions – whether to marry, whom to marry, how to live in a marriage, whether to remain married – are often close to the heart of our life’s meaning”, yet are rarely treated as intellectually significant. We peer into the lives of others to reflect on our own; when we think about marriage, we “stumble across great philosophical themes: desire, freedom, selfhood, change, morality, happiness, belief, the mystery of other minds”. For Eliot, Carlisle argues, marriage was a moral and sociological issue as well as a personal one – and is expressed as such in her fiction, essays, letters and life. Long before she wrote novels, these questions took hold of Eliot’s mind. They simmered within her – urgent and hot.

[See also: Why Middlemarch still matters ]

When Mary Ann Evans met George Henry Lewes, she was in love with another man. Herbert Spencer, a philosopher and editor of the Economist, had taken Eliot out several times when she was 33 and working as an editor at the Westminster Review. But he soon wrote to her to explain that he saw her only as a friend. Eliot at first merely said she was not in a “habitual state of mind to imagine that anyone is falling in love with me”; but later admitted that this was exactly what she hoped. In this letter we see Eliot at her most wanting – she pleads with him to “always be with me”, insisting “I do not ask you to sacrifice anything” and “I can be satisfied with very little”. “If you become attached to someone else, then I must die, but until then I could gather the courage to work and make life valuable, if only I had you near me.” Even here, in such exquisite, desperate need, claiming she needs a man’s love to create work, she shows a resolute self-possession – a sense of her worth, and the worth of her writing: “I suppose no woman ever before wrote such a letter as this – but I am not ashamed of it, for I [know] I am worthy of your respect.”

Spencer continued to see Eliot, but with a friend – George Lewes. Lewes, a prolific journalist well-known in literary circles for his anecdotes and “immense ugliness”, was married with children. He was separated from his wife, who had just had her third child with another man, but continued to support her and his sons. Eliot wrote to friends that despite his “mask of flippancy”, Lewes was “a man of heart and conscience” who “won my liking, in spite of myself”.

We know little of how Eliot came to defy social convention and build a life with a man she could not legally marry – it was not a topic she could discuss in her letters. The first words of Carlisle’s biography are simply: “She had decided.” Still, Carlisle puts this leap in the context of Eliot’s reading life – from her reaction against the matrimonial moralising of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, to her work translating Ludwig Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity, which argues that marriage should not need the formal recognition of the Church. In July 1854, Lewes and Eliot set off on their “honeymoon” to Germany – she would refer to herself to friends as “Mrs Lewes” hereafter.

Though their time away was blissful, on her return Eliot found she was in disgrace – friends and her siblings refused to speak to her. In an 1855 letter, she defended herself against charges of “immorality”: “If there be any one subject on which I feel no levity it is that of marriage… if there is any one action or relation of my life which is and always has been profoundly serious, it is my relation to Mr Lewes… Light and easily broken ties are what I neither desire theoretically nor could live for practically. Women who are satisfied with such ties do not act as I have done – they obtain what they desire and are still invited to dinner.”

In her essay “George Eliot’s Husband”, Elizabeth Hardwick writes that Eliot and Lewes “led the literary life from morning to midnight”, exemplifying that “peculiar English domestic manufacture”, the literary couple. “Before the bright fire at teatime, we can see these high-strung men and women clinging together, their inky fingers touching.” Carlisle’s depiction of Eliot and Lewes’s days are quietly moving. “We work hard in the mornings till our heads are hot, then walk out, dine at three and, if we don’t go out, read diligently aloud in the evening,” Eliot wrote. “It is impossible for two human beings to be more happy in each other.”

It was on their honeymoon that Eliot first broached the idea of writing fiction, reading Lewes a chapter about village life she “happened” to have with her. “Though he distrusted, indeed disbelieved in, my possession of any dramatic power,” Eliot recalled, “he began to think that I might as well try.” Back in England Lewes encouraged her to write a story – not least as they needed money, and fiction was more lucrative than journalism .

[See also: How Nan Shepherd shaped modern nature writing ]

One morning in bed, she came up with a story titled “The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton”. Lewes sent John Blackwood of Blackwood’s Magazine a draft by “a friend”. In January 1857, the first story was published by George Eliot. Lewes was soon in awe of her talent, devoting himself to it – negotiating with Blackwood (who became her long-time publisher), reading drafts, and handling her correspondence to shield her from criticism and protect her time. His pride is palpable on the page. So, too, is Eliot’s gratitude for a husband she loved who also enabled her vocation.

Carlisle explores how questions of matrimony illuminated Eliot’s fiction: Dinah Morris’s sense of marriage as vocation in Adam Bede (1859), the tensions between a passionate nature and provincial morality in The Mill on The Floss (1860), the suffocating misalliances of Middlemarch (1871). In a milieu that valued science over emotion, Eliot was committed to the idea that “surely, surely the only true knowledge of our fellow-man is that which enables us to feel with him… Our subtlest analysis of schools and sects must miss the essential truth, unless it be lit up by the love that sees in… the life and death struggles of separate human beings.”

After two of Lewes’s sons died, mortality loomed in Eliot’s mind. She wrote to his living son Charles: “I think too much, too continually of death now.” To a bereaved friend, she wrote, death had become her “most intimate daily companion… I try to delight in the sunshine that will be when I shall never see it any more. And I think it is possible for this sort of impersonal life to attain greater intensity – possible for us to gain much more independence… We women are always in danger of living too exclusively in the affections; and though our affections are perhaps the best gifts we have, we ought also to have our share of the more independent life – some joy in things for their own sake.” For Carlisle, Eliot here lays bare the tensions “at the heart of her philosophy”: between the self and the other, thought and feeling, independence and dependence.

Lewes died in 1878. The grieving Eliot did not attend his funeral or go outside for weeks. Many were surprised when, in 1880, Eliot defied convention again to marry a close friend 20 years her junior: John Cross, whom she once called “Nephew”. But Carlisle sees this as a “natural growth” in their relationship, borne from shared grief (Cross had just lost his mother). It was a short marriage – Eliot died seven months later, aged 61.

Eliot wanted her private self – Marian Lewes – to remain hidden from public view. Responding to a letter from a friend who mentioned a fading copy of the only photograph of her, she wrote: “The fading is what I desired… Pray let it vanish.” However, she thought often of George Eliot’s legacy. Shortly after the success of Middlemarch, she wrote that she could have no “greater blessing than this growth of my spiritual existence while my bodily existence is decaying”.

Did Eliot’s views on biography soften in her final years? Her relationship with Lewes stayed private to the last: their letters were buried with them in Highgate Cemetery. But in the end, it wasn’t a stranger rifling through her desk but Cross who compiled Eliot’s life. Carlisle wonders if this was part of her motivation for marrying him. (“When he reaches this part of the book, my editor is shocked,” Carlisle writes in an awkward meta aside.) There isn’t much to support this – but for those who read of Eliot’s private life with a guilty, devotional fervour, it’s reassuring to imagine. So here’s the evidence Carlisle can offer, told third-hand: while they were married, Eliot told Cross many stories from her early life. Once, she encouraged him to produce “one work”, “a contribution” to the world. He joked that he could only do so by writing her life. Eliot, he recalled, “smiled and did not answer – did not protest”.

The Marriage Question: George Eliot’s Double Life Clare Carlisle Penguin, 384pp, £ 25

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Book Reviews

A new look at george eliot that's surprisingly approachable.

Meg Wolitzer

My Life in Middlemarch

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Meg Wolitzer's latest novel is The Interestings.

I have to admit that the first time I tried to read Middlemarch by George Eliot, I ended up putting it aside after only 20 pages. My teenage self, feeding heavily at the time on Pearl S. Buck and Go Ask Alice , found the novel difficult and dry. But then one day, when I was older and more discerning and less antsy, I tried again, and this time I was swept in. This time, I guess I was ready.

Rebecca Mead never had such a problem. Her first time out with Middlemarch , at age 17, she found not only a way in, but the book came to serve as a touchstone that she sought out at critical moments in the years that followed. In My Life in Middlemarch , her unusual and deeply felt mashup of lit-crit, biography and memoir, Mead describes a long, complicated relationship with Middlemarch , and, by association, with its brilliant author, George Eliot.

Mary Ann Evans took as a pseudonym her life partner George Lewes' first name, and followed it with a surname that one early biographer speculated was "a further, concealed honoring: 'To L-- I owe it.'" In the more than 140 years since her masterwork was published, esteemed writers have referred to it as probably the greatest novel written in the English language, and it continues to be meaningful to many readers.

Though Mead describes her own meaningful experiences with the book, she also wrestles in a bigger way with what novels do, at least the great ones. Or what we do with them. "A book may not tell us exactly how to live our own lives," she writes, "but our own lives can teach us how to read a book." During her admissions interview at Oxford, she spoke passionately about the novel to an "English literature tutor ... a forbidding-seeming Scotsman who, I learned much later, was possessed of a magnificently dry sense of humor and was particularly partial to bright, ambitious, state-school students from the provinces ... " ( Middlemarch 's subtitle happens to be "A Study of Provincial Life.") After the interview, "I walked across the cobblestones of a narrow lane and stepped onto the wide, lovely sweep of the High Street in a state of exhilaration and anxiety. I felt as if my life were an unread book — the thickest and most daunting of novels — that I was holding in my hands."

And later on, the novel continues to give Mead an extended crash course in how to read a book. Both George Eliot and Rebecca Mead find themselves becoming stepparents, and while originally Mead doesn't think the book can teach her anything about step parenting, once she's researched Eliot's life, she realizes that Eliot's "experience of unexpected family" infuses the book with "the question of being a stepmother ... and of all that might be gained from opening one's heart wider."

For all its literary musings, this book is a surprisingly emotional study of a single novel and novelist. The frame that Mead creates — that of a bookish girl finding her mind opened wider (and later on, as a grown woman, her heart) is satisfying. Personally, I've always been a sucker for books that feature bookish girls. Whenever such a girl or young woman appears on the page, I feel that she's meant to be a stand-in for the reader, or at least an idealized version of the reader. And it's not just bookishness that resonates, but her implied desire to grow, to go on to bigger things than her life can currently give her. And it's gratifying to think that a book might just provide a way to do that. Mead makes for an extremely sympathetic and appealing stand-in reader throughout her book, though not one who's entirely fleshed-out. This is a deliberate choice. The big figure here, the one who's allowed to dominate, is George Eliot. Mead is too modest to want to take up a lot of space with glimpses of her own seaside childhood, life at Oxford, and, later on, love affairs and then marriage, step-motherhood and finally motherhood. And though I really enjoyed all the lightly rendered sections dealing with her own story, and would have certainly been happy to read more of them, she gives the juicy stuff to George Eliot, who doesn't disappoint.

English novelist George Eliot (1819 - 1880), pseudonym of Mary Ann Evans, poses for a photograph. Hulton Archive/Getty Images hide caption

English novelist George Eliot (1819 - 1880), pseudonym of Mary Ann Evans, poses for a photograph.

Eliot, who was described physically by Henry James as "magnificently ugly — deliciously hideous," lived unmarried with her lover George Lewes, and told one friend that they practiced birth control. Her complex and liberated self — emotionally, sexually and, most of all, intellectually — is on full display here. And also on display is the heroine of Middlemarch , Dorothea Brooke, and her terrible, mismatched marriage to the much older, pinched Reverend Casaubon; as well as various other figures who circulate in the town. It's been a long time since I've read Middlemarch , and my most recent encounter with it was, I confess, in the form of a BBC miniseries in the mid-'90s. But no matter. When Mead described these various characters, even minor ones whom I'd forgotten about, I imagined I was at a dinner party at which a really smart person was holding court about some real-life people I'd never met. But by the end of the meal I felt as if I knew them.

Mead describes the theme of the novel as "growing out of ...self-centeredness." And I got excited and thought, yes, yes, that's exactly what novels can do. She writes, "The bare object of a book... might ... have a subtle relation to our own past... Even the most sophisticated readers read novels in the light of their own experience, and in such recognition, sympathy may begin."

All of this brings up the obvious and very reasonable question: do you have to have read Middlemarch to read My Life in Middlemarch ? I'm reminded of the old ad for rye bread that went, "You don't have to be Jewish to love Levy's." And I'm certain that you don't have to read (or re-read) Middlemarch to love this extraordinary book. But I have the feeling that you'll probably want to anyway.

Biography of George Eliot, English Novelist

The pen name of Mary Ann Evans, author of Middlemarch

Library of Congress /  public domain

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Born Mary Ann Evans, George Eliot (November 22, 1819 – December 22, 1880) was an English novelist during the Victorian era . Although female authors did not always use pen names in her era, she chose to do so for reasons both personal and professional. Her novels were her best-known works, including Middlemarch , which is often considered among the greatest novels in the English language.

Fast Facts: George Eliot

• Full Name:  Mary Ann Evans
• Also Known As: George Eliot, Marian Evans, Mary Ann Evans Lewes
• Known For:  English writer
• Born:  November 22, 1819 in Nuneaton, Warwickshire, England
• Died:  December 22, 1880 in London, England
• Parents:  Robert Evans and Christiana Evans ( née  Pearson)
• Partners: George Henry Lewes (1854-1878), John Cross (m. 1880)
• Education:  Mrs. Wallington's, Misses Franklin's, Bedford College
• Published Works:   The Mill on the Floss  (1860),  Silas Marner  (1861),  Romola  (1862–1863),  Middlemarch  (1871–72),  Daniel Deronda  (1876)
• Notable Quote:  “It is never too late to be what you might have been.”

Eliot was born Mary Ann Evans (sometimes written as Marian) in Nuneaton, Warwickshire, England, in 1819. Her father, Robert Evans, was an estate manager for a nearby baronet, and her mother, Christiana, was the daughter of the local mill owner. Robert had been married previously, with two children (a son, also named Robert, and a daughter, Fanny), and Eliot had four full-blooded siblings as well: an older sister, Christiana (known as Chrissey), an older brother, Isaac, and twin younger brothers who died in infancy.

Unusually for a girl of her era and social station, Eliot received a relatively robust education in her early life. She wasn’t considered beautiful, but she did have a strong appetite for learning, and those two things combined led her father to believe that her best chances in life would lie in education, not marriage. From ages five to sixteen, Eliot attended a series of boarding schools for girls, predominantly schools with strong religious overtones (although the specifics of those religious teachings varied). Despite this schooling, her learning was largely self-taught, in great part thanks to her father’s estate management role allowing her access to the estate’s great library. As a result, her writing developed heavy influences from classical literature, as well as from her own observations of socioeconomic stratification .

When Eliot was sixteen, her mother Christiana died, so Eliot returned home to take over the housekeeping role in her family, leaving her education behind except for continued correspondence with one of her teachers, Maria Lewis. For the next five years, she remained largely at home caring for her family, until 1841, when her brother Isaac married, and he and his wife took over the family home. At that point, she and her father moved Foleshill, a town near the city of Coventry.

Joining New Society

The move to Coventry opened new doors for Eliot, both socially and academically. She came into contact with a much more liberal, less religious social circle, including such luminaries as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Harriet Martineau , thanks to her friends, Charles and Cara Bray. Known as the “Rosehill Circle,” named after the Brays’ home, this group of creatives and thinkers espoused rather radical, often agnostic ideas, which opened Eliot’s eyes to new ways of thinking that her highly religious education had not touched on. Her questioning of her faith led to a minor rift between her and her father, who threatened to throw her out of the house, but she quietly carried out superficial religious duties while continuing her new education.

Eliot did return once more to formal education, becoming one of the first graduates of Bedford College, but otherwise largely stuck to keeping house for her father. He died in 1849, when Eliot was thirty. She traveled to Switzerland with the Brays, then stayed there alone for a time, reading and spending time in the countryside. Eventually, she returned to London in 1850, where she was determined to make a career as a writer.

This period in Eliot’s life was also marked by some turmoil in her personal life. She dealt with unrequited feelings for some of her male colleagues, including publisher John Chapman (who was married, in an open relationship, and lived with both his wife and his mistress) and philosopher Herbert Spencer. In 1851, Eliot met George Henry Lewes, a philosopher and literary critic, who became the love of her life. Although he was married, his marriage was an open one (his wife, Agnes Jervis, had an open affair and four children with newspaper editor Thomas Leigh Hunt), and by 1854, he and Eliot had decided to live together. They traveled together to Germany, and, upon their return, considered themselves married in spirit, if not in law; Eliot even began to refer to Lewes as her husband and even legally changed her name to Mary Ann Eliot Lewes after his death. Although affairs were commonplace, the openness of Eliot and Lewes’s relationship caused much moral criticism.

Editorial Work (1850-1856)

• The Westminster Review (1850-1856)
• The Essence of Christianity (1854, translation)
• Ethics (translation completed 1856; published posthumously)

After returning to England from Switzerland in 1850, Eliot began pursuing a writing career in earnest. During her time with the Rosehill Circle, she had met Chapman, and by 1850, he had purchased The Westminster Review . He had published Eliot’s first formal work – a translation of German thinker David Strauss's  The Life of Jesus – and he hired her onto the journal’s staff almost immediately after she returned to England.

At first, Eliot was just a writer at the journal, penning articles that were critical of Victorian society and thought. In many of her articles, she advocated for the lower classes and criticized organized religion (in a bit of a turnabout from her early religious education). In 1851, after being at the publication for just one year, she was promoted to assistant editor, but continued writing as well. Although she had plenty of company with female writers, she was an anomaly as a female editor.

Between January 1852 and mid-1854, Eliot essentially served as the de facto editor of the journal. She wrote articles in support of the wave of revolutions that swept Europe in 1848 and advocating for similar but more gradual reforms in England. For the most part, she did the majority of the work of running the publication, from its physical appearance to its content to its business dealings. During this time, she also continued pursuing her interest in theological texts, working on translations of Ludwig Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity and of Baruch Spinoza’s Ethics ; the latter was not published until after her death.

Early Forays into Fiction (1856-1859)

• Scenes of Clerical Life (1857-1858)
• The Lifted Veil (1859)
• Adam Bede (1859)

During her time editing the Westminster Review , Eliot developed a desire to move into writing novels . One of her last essays for the journal, titled “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists,” laid out her perspective on novels of the time. She criticized the banality of contemporary novels written by women, comparing them unfavorably to the wave of realism sweeping through the continental literary community, which would eventually inspire her own novels.

As she prepared to take the plunge into writing fiction, she chose a masculine pen name : George Eliot, taking Lewes’s first name along with a surname she chose based on its simplicity and appeal to her. She published her first story, “The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton," in 1857 in Blackwood’s Magazine . It would be the first of a trio of stories that eventually were published in 1858 as the two-volume book Scenes of Clerical Life .

Eliot’s identity remained a mystery for the first few years of her career. Scenes of Clerical Life was believed to have been written by a country parson or a wife of a parson. In 1859, she published her first complete novel, Adam Bede . The novel became so popular that even Queen Victoria was a fan, commissioning an artist, Edward Henry Corbould, to paint scenes from the book for her.

Because of the novel’s success, public interest in Eliot’s identity spiked. At one point, a man named Joseph Liggins claimed that he was the real George Eliot. In order to head off more of these imposters and satisfy public curiosity, Eliot revealed herself soon after. Her slightly scandalous private life surprised many, but fortunately, it did not affect the popularity of her work. Lewes supported her financially as well as emotionally, but it would be nearly 20 years before they would be accepted into formal society as a couple.

Popular Novelist and Political Ideas (1860-1876)

• The Mill on the Floss (1860)
• Silas Marner (1861)
• Romola (1863)
• Brother Jacob (1864)
• "The Influence of Rationalism" (1865)
• In a London Drawingroom (1865)
• Two Lovers (1866)
• Felix Holt, the Radical (1866)
• The Choir Invisible (1867)
• The Spanish Gypsy (1868)
• Agatha (1869)
• Brother and Sister (1869)
• Armgart (1871)
• Middlemarch (1871–1872)
• The Legend of Jubal (1874)
• I Grant You Ample Leave (1874)
• Arion (1874)
• A Minor Prophet (1874)
• Daniel Deronda (1876)
• Impressions of Theophrastus Such (1879)

As Eliot’s popularity grew, she continued working on novels, eventually writing a total of seven. The Mill on the Floss was her next work, published in 1860 and dedicated to Lewes. Over the next few years, she produced more novels: Silas Marner (1861), Romola (1863), and Felix Holt, the Radical (1866). In general, her novels were consistently popular and sold well. She made several attempts at poetry, which were less popular.

Eliot also wrote and spoke openly about political and social issues. Unlike many of her compatriots, she vocally supported the Union cause in the American Civil War , as well as the growing movement for Irish home rule . She was also heavily influenced by the writings of John Stuart Mill , particularly with regards to his support of women’s suffrage and rights. In several letters and other writings, she advocated for equal education and professional opportunities and argued against the idea that women were somehow naturally inferior.

Eliot’s most famous and acclaimed book was written towards the later part of her career. Middlemarch was published in 1871. Covering a wide range of issues, including British electoral reform, the role of women in society, and the class system, it was received with middling reviews in Eliot’s day but today is considered one of the greatest novels in the English language. In 1876, she published her final novel, Daniel Deronda . After that, she retired to Surrey with Lewes. He died two years later, in 1878, and she spent two years editing his final work, Life and Mind . Eliot’s last published work was the semi-fictionalized essay collection Impressions of Theophrastus Such , published in 1879.

Literary Style and Themes

Like many authors, Eliot drew from her own life and observations in her writing. Many of her works depicted rural society, both the positives and the negatives. On the one hand, she believed in the literary worth of even the smallest, most mundane details of ordinary country life, which shows up in the settings of many of her novels, including Middlemarch . She wrote in the realist school of fiction, attempting to depict her subjects as naturally as possible and avoid flowery artifice; she specifically reacted against the feather-light, ornamental, and trite writing style preferred by some of her contemporaries , especially by fellow female authors.

Eliot’s depictions of country life were not all positive, though. Several of her novels, such as Adam Bede and The Mill on the Floss , examine what happens to outsiders in the close-knit rural communities that were so easily admired or even idealized. Her sympathy for the persecuted and marginalized bled into her more overtly political prose, such as Felix Holt, the Radical and Middlemarch , which dealt with the influence of politics on “normal” life and characters.

Because of her Rosehill-era interest in translation, Eliot was gradually influenced by German philosophers. This manifested itself in her novels in a largely humanistic approach to social and religious topics. Her own sense of social alienation due to religious reasons (her dislike of organized religion and her affair with Lewes scandalized the devout in her communities) made its way into her novels as well. Although she retained some of her religiously based ideas (such as the concept of atoning for sin through penance and suffering), her novels reflected her own worldview that was more spiritual or agnostic than traditionally religious.

Lewes’s death devastated Eliot, but she found companionship with John Walter Cross, a Scottish commission agent. He was 20 years younger than her, which led to some scandal when they married in May 1880. Cross was not mentally well, however, and jumped from their hotel balcony into the Grand Canal while they were on their honeymoon in Venice . He survived and returned with Eliot to England.

She had been suffering from kidney disease for several years, and that, combined with a throat infection she contracted in late 1880, proved too much for her health. George Eliot died on December 21, 1880; she was 61 years old. Despite her status, she was not buried alongside other literary luminaries at Westminster Abbey because of her vocal opinions against organized religion and her long-term, adulterous affair with Lewes. Instead, she was buried in an area of Highgate Cemetery reserved for the more controversial members of society, next to Lewes. On the 100 th anniversary of her death, a stone was placed in the Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey in her honor.

In the years immediately following her death, Eliot’s legacy was more complicated. The scandal of her long-term relationship with Lewes had not entirely faded (as demonstrated by her exclusion from the Abbey), and yet on the other hand, critics including Nietzsche , criticized her remaining religious beliefs and how they impacted her moral stances in her writing. Soon after her death, Cross wrote a poorly received biography of Eliot that portrayed her as nearly saintly. This obviously fawning (and false) portrayal contributed to a decline in sales and interest in Eliot’s books and life.

In later years, however, Eliot returned to prominence thanks to the interest of a number of scholars and writers, including Virginia Woolf . Middlemarch , in particular, regained prominence and eventually became widely acknowledged as one of the greatest works of English literature. Eliot’s work is widely read and studied, and her works have been adapted for film, television, and theater on numerous occasions.

• Ashton, Rosemary.  George Eliot: A Life . London: Penguin, 1997.
• Haight, Gordon S.  George Eliot: A Biography.  New York: Oxford University Press, 1968.
• Henry, Nancy,  The Life of George Eliot: A Critical Biography , Wiley-Blackwell, 2012.
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The Life of George Eliot: A Critical Biography 1st Edition

• A fresh look at George Eliot's captivating life story
• Includes original new analysis of her writing
• Deploys the latest biographical research
• Combines literary criticism with biographical narrative to offer a rounded perspective
• ISBN-10 1405137053
• ISBN-13 978-1405137058
• Edition 1st
• Publisher Wiley-Blackwell
• Publication date May 7, 2012
• Language English
• Dimensions 6.25 x 0.8 x 9.3 inches
• Print length 320 pages
• See all details

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Editorial Reviews

“…this learned, adventurous new biographer has changed the landscape of George Eliot studies.” (The George Eliot Review, 1 November 2012)

“Clean prose and relatively minimal endnotes make the book accessible to undergraduates. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.” ( Choice , 1 October 2012)

“Henry provides a useful reminder that that old-fashioned pejorative, adulteress, might have been applied to Eliot as well as to Agnes, and she provides a sensitive analysis of the novels in the light of that insight.” ( The New Yorker , 6 August 2012)

“Driven neither by hero-worship or spite, Henry's "critical biography" demonstrates what treasure there is still to be found in even the most worked-over subjects. The trick is to ask the questions that everyone else assumed had been answered years ago.” ( The Guardian , 2 June 2012)

“Such insights fill this book, which shows penetrating intelligence from first to last. Nancy Henry has managed, seamlessly but always with needed distinctions, to unite, in exacting interrelation and with edges sharp, George Eliot’s lived experience and imaginative experience.” ( George Eliot-G.H. Lewes Studies , 1 September 2012)

From the Inside Flap

The life of the Victorian novelist George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) is as dramatic as the plot of a novel: a brilliant but unattractive country girl moves to London, elopes with a married man and is ostracized by society until she begins writing novels under a male pseudonym and goes on to accumulate great wealth and fame.

George Eliot’s dedication to realism renders the relationship between her life and her novels especially intriguing. Incorporating the very latest research in the field of George Eliot studies, this biography re-examines the story of her life, cross-referencing its fascinating narrative with analysis of her fiction and poetry. In doing so, the author reveals how Eliot’s life provides insight into her art as well as how her art can enhance our understanding of her life. Informed by cutting-edge academic research, and including critical interpretations of her work from multiple theoretical perspectives, this new Life of George Eliot is a critical biography for the twenty-first century.

From the Back Cover

About the author.

Nancy Henry is Professor of English at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. She is the author of George Eliot and the British Empire (2002), the Cambridge Introduction to George Eliot (2008), and co-editor of Victorian Investments: New Perspectives on Finance and Culture (2009).

Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Wiley-Blackwell; 1st edition (May 7, 2012)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 320 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1405137053
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1405137058
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.2 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.25 x 0.8 x 9.3 inches
• #1,407 in Victorian Literary Criticism (Books)
• #8,996 in British & Irish Literary Criticism (Books)
• #24,065 in Author Biographies

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Nancy henry.

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Where to start with: George Eliot

Her uplifting and melancholy masterpieces include Middlemarch – but you can enjoy funny, wise stories that are less than 800 pages long too

N ovelist, journalist and translator Mary Ann Evans, better known, of course, by her pen name George Eliot , is remembered primarily for Middlemarch, praised by Virginia Woolf as “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people”. Yet the Victorian writer wrote seven novels in total, as well as short stories and poems that deserve a look-in too – Eliot’s biographer Clare Carlisle suggests some good places to start.

The one to make you laugh out loud

The Mill on the Floss, George Eliot’s second and most autobiographical novel, features a passionate, intelligent young heroine stuck in small-town Middle England. While Maggie Tulliver longs for wider horizons, her dim-witted mother obsesses about her linen cupboard, her prized silver sugar tongs and her sister’s expensive new hat. As in Middlemarch, comedy ensues when high ideals and all-too-human pettiness collide. Be warned, this novel is a tragedy – it is also “The one that will make you cry” – but poor Maggie’s dreadful aunts are among Eliot’s funniest creations.

The one if you’re in a rush

George Eliot’s first works of fiction were a series of three stories, all starring hapless provincial vicars. They were originally published in Blackwood’s Magazine, then collected in a book titled Scenes of Clerical Life. In the third story, Janet’s Repentance, Eliot really hits her stride. Like her mature novels, this is a dark marriage drama: its heroine, Janet Dempster, is abused by her violent husband and descends into an alcoholic spiral of shame and despair. One night she is thrown out of her house and shivers barefoot on the doorstep in a skimpy nightie, drunkenly wishing herself dead. It’s all a far cry from Jane Austen’s drawing rooms. This brilliant novella showcases Eliot’s dramatic flair, philosophical sensibility and deep emotional intelligence. It was based on real life, she told her publisher when he asked her to “soften” the story – and she refused to change it. The real Dempster, she said, “was far more disgusting than mine; the real Janet, alas!, had a far sadder end than mine.”

The one to drop into dinner party conversation

Romola, set in Renaissance Florence, is Eliot’s challenging middle work. Written in the 1860s, its tall, dreamy, red-haired heroine would not be out of place in a pre-Raphaelite painting. In this ambitious novel Eliot flexed her creative powers, assembling a hybrid cast of fictional and historical characters – the philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli, the artist Piero di Cosimo, the firebrand monk Savonarola. Impress your friends by explaining how this highbrow novel uses its 15th-century setting to explore grand Victorian themes: the loss of faith, the fragility of patriarchal power. Just make sure you pronounce “Romola” right – as Eliot told one of her fans, stress the first syllable, and the second “o” is short. (Think “gondola”, not “tombola”.)

The one that will cheer you up

Most of Eliot’s novels are uplifting and melancholy, and Silas Marner is particularly tender-hearted. This small masterpiece probes human failure while allowing human goodness to shine through. Its fairytale quality is deceptively simple, though. Eliot wrote it while she was plotting Romola and preparing to become a stepmother to her partner’s teenage sons. Daunted by both tasks, she poured into Silas Marner her anxieties about combining love and work, motherhood and creativity. In the novel, love and motherhood triumph. In the author’s life, not surprisingly, things turned out to be more complicated.

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If you only read one, it should be

Middlemarch, of course. This is deservedly considered not just Eliot’s masterpiece, but one of the finest English novels ever written. It is funny, wise, grand, intimate and deeply philosophical. Eliot’s portraits of two disastrous marriages are exquisitely drawn, while the relationship between the Brooke sisters – proud, naive Dorothea and sweet, sharp Celia – is sheer delight. When Middlemarch was published in 1872, The Times declared it a “perfect” work of art. While a few reviewers grumbled that not a lot happens over its 800 pages, Edith Simcox, an astute young critic who was soon to become Eliot’s close friend and unrequited lover, realised that this novel opened a new “epoch” in literature by taking its drama “from the inner life.” For this reason, as so many devoted readers have found, nothing is lost on re-reading – and something new is gained every time. It is just breathtakingly good.

The one that deserves more attention

What does an author write after Middlemarch? While a lesser artist would have rested on her laurels, George Eliot conceived a new novel even more daring and ambitious: Daniel Deronda. She defied the Victorian reading public by vesting the story’s moral weight in Jewish characters and experimented with a literary form inspired by Kabbalist philosophy. The result is flawed, yet dazzling. Spirited Gwendolen Harleth is Eliot’s most compelling heroine: shallow and complex, symbolic and believable, very far from perfect and totally irresistible. Gwendolen’s horrifying marriage to a ruthlessly controlling man mirrors Eliot’s vision of an upper-class English culture that conceals moral hypocrisy, sexual violence, and the cruelties of empire beneath its polite veneer. Unlike her other novels, set in a nostalgia-tinged past, Daniel Deronda is bracingly modern and looked towards a new century. It depicted hysteria, neurosis and childhood trauma before Freud made those concepts mainstream. For me, a child of the 80s, Harleth prefigures Diana Spencer: charismatic, unstable, at once ordinary and archetypal. She shines in the limelight, secretly desperate in her fabulous clothes, destined to be trapped in a pathologically English marriage.

• Where to start with
• George Eliot

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The best george eliot books, recommended by philip davis.

The Transferred Life of George Eliot by Philip Davis

George Eliot is all but synonymous with Victorian realism; for D H Lawrence, she was the first novelist to start ‘putting all the action inside .’ Here, Philip Davis , author of The Transferred Life of George Eliot , selects the best books by or about one of the greatest novelists of all time: ‘If you want to read literature that sets out to create a holding ground for raw human material—for human struggles, difficulties, and celebrations—read George Eliot’

Interview by David Shackleton

Scenes of Clerical Life by George Eliot

Adam Bede by George Eliot

The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot

Middlemarch by George Eliot

George Eliot's Life, as Related in Her Letters and Journals by John Walter Cross

1 Scenes of Clerical Life by George Eliot

2 adam bede by george eliot, 3 the mill on the floss by george eliot, 4 middlemarch by george eliot, 5 george eliot's life, as related in her letters and journals by john walter cross.

Y ou have written about the continuing importance of reading Victorian fiction. Why read George Eliot ?

If you want to read literature that sets out to create a holding ground for raw human material—for human struggles, difficulties, and celebrations—then you should read George Eliot. The aim of the great Victorian novel was to include as richly as possible that diverse and difficult territory.

If you were to place her in a literary context, which other realist writers would you put her alongside?

Above all, Leo Tolstoy . But if we’re talking about the English context, then I suppose Elizabeth Gaskell, Anthony Trollope and Anne Brontë. But she is in a different league to them. The only person who can touch her as a novelist, in my estimation, is Tolstoy.

If we think about later literary movements, we might think of naturalism and modernism. What are the advantages of realism over these later movements?

I tend to be wary of these titles and periods, because I think of reading as a sort of time travel. But think, for example, of D H Lawrence reading as a young man in provincial Eastwood in Nottinghamshire. He said to Jessie Chambers—the girl with whom he was reading—that it was George Eliot who ‘started putting all the action inside ’.

“Victorian realism is extraordinarily powerful, in ways that are not fully recognised, and George Eliot is the great representative of Victorian realism in ‘all ordinary human life’”

Here, we have the sense that we’re getting away from the novel merely as a story or entertainment, and towards the novel as a great inward psychological investigation. Lawrence the modernist writer follows from the tradition of the great provincial writer George Eliot. The crucial method that she develops concerns psychology. It’s as if she understands human beings better than any novelist had ever done before.

Historically, George Eliot was also writing at a time when many people lost their faith in God. If such people no longer found orthodox religion credible, they nonetheless wanted something that would replace a sense of meaning and purpose in the world.

You might ask that if you haven’t got something magical to turn to, what is the purpose of what you’re doing? What would make life worth living? These are the questions that get embedded within ordinary lives in the work of George Eliot.

That’s an interesting connection between George Eliot and D H Lawrence. Although both were from the Midlands, didn’t they come from rather different classes? Lawrence’s father was a coal miner.

George Eliot was not working class in the way that Lawrence’s father was. Though if you remember, Lawrence’s mother came from a slightly higher class, and was very keen on education, so there was a tension in their marriage.

But in George Eliot’s case—or Mary Anne Evans as she was born—her father had worked his way up from being an artisan to eventually becoming the land manager of an estate for the local aristocracy. So, he was a craftsman from the higher working classes who was beginning to establish himself within a middle-class background.

But he always thought that he was under-educated, and he wanted his daughter to be properly educated. You can see some of that story in The Mill on the Floss , which is a transmuted autobiography of Marian Evans’s early life.

Why did you chose to recommend the story ‘Janet’s Repentance’ from Scenes of Clerical Life ?

I was thinking partly about its chronology—it comes from her first published work. But also it is short, and so is a good place to start from if you’re coming to George Eliot for the first time.

Let’s remember that it’s sort of a miracle that George Eliot became George Eliot, which she did at the age of 37 or 38. She had formed an unconventional relationship with George Henry Lewes, who was already married. This gave her the security to begin a second life, and to transform from Marian Evans into the novelist George Eliot.

Before becoming a novelist, she had been a formidable self-educated intellectual who had virtually run The Westminster Review in London. But she was not content with just being an intellectual, because she needed something that is contained in the power of feeling as well as in ideas.

‘Janet’s Repentance’ is the best story in Scenes of Clerical Life , her first work of fiction. It is about a woman, Janet, who is married to Dempster. He is a local lawyer and alcoholic who, in his increasing degeneration, abuses and beats his wife.

The first move that George Eliot makes as a realist novelist is this: of course, Janet is a victim of her husband. But this is not a simple category. Where normal people will have one thought, George Eliot will have many. Janet, though the victim, begins to collude in what has happened to her and begins to drink herself. That makes her life more complicated.

She also takes her husband’s side in the local religious politics. A new man comes to their small town—a man called Mr Tryan—who is an evangelical, and therefore of a different religious party from Dempster. She joins with her husband in wishing to do this man down.

However, when going to visit a poor old woman who is dying, Janet stops at the threshold of the door into the sickroom and Tryan—her husband’s enemy—is there talking to the woman. As he talks, Janet cannot see him but she can hear him. Her normal prejudices built around seeing are held in abeyance, and she listens to the tone in which he speaks to the sick woman.

Janet no longer thinks of this man as an enemy but suddenly, to her surprise, finds that he is an equal human being. Such a second thought is simple, but it’s also powerful. It’s a moment when conventionalities fall away and something real happens.

This is why we shouldn’t dismiss Victorian realism as conventional. It isn’t just interested in the day-to-day; it’s interested in what happens within the day-to-day, and in revelation: suddenly seeing somebody’s inside manifested in the outside world.

“Victorian realism isn’t just interested in the day-to-day; it’s interested in what happens within the day-to-day, and in revelation: suddenly seeing somebody’s inside manifested in the outside world”

Eventually, Janet is thrown out by Dempster. You’d have thought that this would have been a great relief to her because she hadn’t dared to walk out herself—but actually she feels devastated.

Again, you see the complication. It’s not that leaving Dempster is a solution to all her troubles: rather, she doesn’t know what to do, and suddenly finds the big question of what her purpose is opening up before her.

‘Sympathy’ is a word that is often associated with Eliot. What role does sympathy play in this story?

When Janet hears Tryan comforting the dying woman, she hears the pure tones of human sympathy. He asks the dying woman to pray for him too, as he fears death and admits that it is one of his worst weaknesses to shrink from bodily pain. As a result, Janet begins to feel some sympathetic relation to Tryan: she thinks that he too is a human being, who has troubles like her own.

So, sympathy here is to do with the sudden forming of a relation. It may not be completely certain, it may be across great distances, but there is some emotional and imaginative connection. ‘Sympathy’ is better than the word ‘empathy’, because it conveys the fact that although you can feel for someone, you are not the same as them and you know it.

All the struggles to feel for and with people are involved in that word ‘sympathy’. In George Eliot, although it looks like a soft word, it becomes complicated and deep. Without sympathy as a small version of love, human beings have very little to call upon.

Janet and Tryan go on to develop a close relationship.

George Eliot is unafraid, even in a post-religious age, of the idea that people need to be saved. Janet is saved by Tryan in a secular way by the fact that at some level he loves her and she loves him.

Their relationship is not sexually consummated, but there is something sexual about it. They develop a relationship in which he is her supporter, her counsellor, the person who is going to help her from the despair of her alcoholism, so that, when he dies, she is his work; she is in memory of him.

Their relationship is about having someone to love and be loved by. In the teeth of modern scepticism, George Eliot retains a belief in the strong positive needs that make people feel vulnerable, and about which they’re often ashamed or in denial.

When Janet gets locked out of her home by the furious Dempster in the middle of the night, Eliot writes that ‘she seemed to be looking into her own blank future’. Could you tell us about the story’s presentation of time?

Yes. Suddenly Janet is freed from a situation in her marriage that had seemed endless. The present becomes very abrupt, and separated from the past, but it also seems to have no future. The future appears ‘blank’, as George Eliot puts it.

George Eliot is very interested in those moments of transition, although they don’t always feel like transition. Notionally, you know that there was the past and that there will be a future. Yet you don’t feel that the present moment is going to lead to anything; you don’t know that there will necessarily be a story or a narrative; you could just be stuck between things.

She is brilliant at depicting such ‘in-between’ moments that are deeply uncomfortable and disorienting in time or in space. She can detect them, whereas we might not have understood or even noticed them.

It’s similar to when Dorothea marries Casaubon in Middlemarch , and on her honeymoon finds herself again in that blankness, not knowing what is happening or what it is leading to. It’s in such moments that people struggle with all their resources to see if they can evolve, whilst not knowing whether there will be any emergence. That sense of crisis and predicament where time is almost suspended is crucial for George Eliot.

You mentioned Eliot’s transformation into a novelist. Could you tell us about her relationship to John Blackwood, and how that had an impact on her fiction?

The relationship with Blackwood was almost wholly conducted through George Henry Lewes. Marian Evans was a clever but unattractive woman. She had a series of embarrassing and humiliating liaisons with older men, and was variously rejected. Eventually, although it was by no means ideal because she couldn’t marry him, she found her partner in George Henry Lewes.

It was George Henry Lewes who took over the business end of things. He was the one who provided her with the confidence to try again to be a writer. She’d had some initial goes at fiction but not many, and he encouraged her.

It was he who, on the basis of his literary contacts, made a connection with Blackwood. Initially, he said that George Eliot was a male, and sought to protect her because Blackwood could be critical.

Blackwood was very concerned about ‘Janet’s Repentance’, with its risky subject matter of alcoholism and the abuse of wives. He was a decent man but very conservative. It was up to George Henry Lewes to say to Blackwood that he must not criticize his friend George Eliot because, being very thin-skinned, he would not write any more. Indeed, Lewes had to protect George Eliot throughout her life from reviews and criticism because she was highly insecure.

Blackwood became a very loyal supporter. However, there was a difficult moment when, encouraged by George Henry Lewes, George Eliot decided to leave him because a rival publisher was offering her an enormous amount of money for Romola . She returned to Blackwood later, contrite that she had left the old firm, and achieved great success with works such as Middlemarch .

Is it significant that Lewes claimed that George Eliot was a man in his initial correspondence with Blackwood?

Yes. Marian Evans was contemptuous of many women novelists. If she was a proto-feminist, it wasn’t because she wanted to support women writers. She felt that some women, whether through their own fault or otherwise, were letting down the seriousness of being a woman. So, it seemed to her best to dissociate herself from frivolous lady novelists, in order that the novel should be taken seriously.

“She felt that some women, whether through their own fault or otherwise, were letting down the seriousness of being a woman. So, it seemed to her best to dissociate herself…”

Am I right to think that Eliot’s first full-length novel Adam Bede started life as one of the stories in  Scenes of Clerical Life ?

It was originally planned as an extension of Scenes of Clerical Life . Already in ‘Janet’s Repentance’, she was clearly moving towards needing the full canvas of the novel. She then turned from ‘Janet’s Repentance’ to write Adam Bede , which includes a transmuted version of her own father as Adam Bede.

Can you tell us about that novel?

The novel can be thought of as a triangle, with characters for its points. There’s Adam Bede: tough, morally scrupulous and self-made, but with an edge to that toughness. So, he doesn’t like his fellow workers downing their tools at six o’clock just because it’s six o’clock. He likes them to finish the job. It’s that sort of artisan strictness. He’s thoroughly straight and decent.

There is also Hetty, a beautiful young woman with whom he falls in love. Hetty hasn’t even begun to think yet, and has no need to: she’s a fantasist. Adam Bede loves her and they are engaged, but—here lies the complication—there is another man.

That other man is Arthur Donnithorne, who is a Squire and becomes Adam Bede’s employer. It is Arthur who takes Hetty away from Adam without him knowing it. He seduces her and leaves for the army, not knowing that Hetty is pregnant.

Suddenly, this provincial novel goes wild. Hetty leaves her home and embarks on a journey to try to find Arthur while heavily pregnant. Her world turns into a nightmare, and she has to bear the most terrible thoughts. It’s as if a limited human being were thrown into a limitless situation.

You might have thought that George Eliot would have been critical of her character Hetty, given that she is beautiful but not very intelligent. But such considerations suddenly drop away (just as they had dropped for Janet in relation to Tryan) when she sets Hetty in this terrible predicament: pregnant, wandering around without direction, unable to find Arthur, not knowing what to do with the baby who is about to be born, and thinking of committing suicide.

At one point, she sits by the side of a pool in which she might drown herself. She had been a vain creature, but here her vanity is transformed. She begins to feel her own arms, and the pleasure of that feeling, the warmth and the roundness of the flesh, makes her think that she should live—that she shouldn’t commit suicide. What had been before silly and weak, is now something on the side of life. George Eliot loves those transitions.

Thinking back to the love-triangle, the relationship between Adam and Arthur comes to a head in the chapter called ‘Crisis’.

It was a chapter that George Henry Lewes had partly suggested: to bring the two men together to create a sort of implosion. But what is remarkable about it is not the anger and violence on Adam’s part, although that is there. Rather, what is interesting, in one of those switches of perspective that are so powerful in George Eliot, is the effect on Arthur.

When Arthur realises how damaged and hurt Adam is by his actions, he experiences something irrevocable. At that moment the feckless Arthur—who is not a bad man but is sexually besotted with Hetty—suddenly sees for the first time, looking at Adam’s face, that there are things that you cannot get away with.

“Suddenly, this provincial novel goes wild”

That reality principle—that there will be consequences—is the astounding depth of the ‘Crisis’ chapter. It’s not about the sensationalism of bringing the two men together in a potential fight. Instead, it explores ‘morality’ (which might otherwise seem a very dull Victorian concept) as an inner psychological process, in which Arthur realises the indelible consequences of his actions.

In those moments when Arthur realises the terrible damage that he’s done, you get an interior language—what Lawrence called ‘action’ on the ‘inside’—which is not spoken out loud. It is what we all silently say in our hearts or minds or brains, and sometimes don’t even want to know that we’re saying it.

Technically, this is called free indirect discourse. It’s not direct discourse in which a character says something out loud, or ‘thinks that…’. Rather, it’s an ambiguous discourse that follows Arthur’s train of thought, even though he himself may not know or want to know what he is thinking. That’s one of the important technical moves that George Eliot makes.

Thinking more about this psychological understanding, you have elsewhere drawn a parallel between Eliot as a realist novelist and psychological field theory. Could you explain that parallel?

Basically, it’s about getting into areas—often of secrecy—where suddenly that which will not be spoken out loud in society, nonetheless begins to find expression in a secret language of unconsummated confession.

These areas can be geographical or prompted by geography. For example, when Hetty leaves her home and goes into the country in search of Arthur, it’s not just that she’s in the wilderness but that she’s in a different psychological place prompted by that wilderness. Her thoughts almost seem outside her, as she looks at the pool as the place of suicide.

For other people, these fields go on inside . For example, there’s the dishonest banker Mr Bulstrode in Middlemarch who wants to forget his past, but eventually that past begins to be uncovered and he begins to feel terrible fear.

George Eliot said that it’s like trying to look out of the window during a dark night. When the lights are illuminated behind you in the room, you can’t see out of the window: what you see are reflections of yourself and the room behind you.

That is a wonderful image of creating a psychological field: you want to look out but suddenly with the reflection, you’re being turned back in, back to the past. You cannot get away from the zone—in this case, of guilt—that has been created around you. It’s a place that you now have to inhabit psychologically.

You mentioned that Eliot achieves psychological interiority through free indirect discourse. Jane Austen is also known for her adept use of free indirect discourse. What’s the relation between the two? Was Eliot inspired by Austen? Did she learn from her?

I think she did learn from her, though there’s no explicit record of this. It’s a deep and complicated question that you’re asking here, but I suppose that it’s different in George Eliot for this reason: she is utterly obsessed with secrets.

It’s true that Jane Austen is very committed to privacy within the public, and in that sense there’s a likeness in terms of hidden psychology and hidden forms of being. But it’s a lot more fraught in George Eliot than it is in Jane Austen, because often her characters either want those things to come out, or they are fearful that they will come out.

For George Eliot, psychology is doubly important because there isn’t anything else. That is to say, if you want to find purpose or meaning in life, you’re going to have to find it in this psychological holding ground. She does not subscribe to a firm theology; she is a big reader of philosophy but does not believe in a single philosophical system. In a world without answers, the great holding ground is within the human psyche, with all of its messiness.

You described The Mill on the Floss as a transmuted autobiography . How is that so?

In one sense, it’s simple. Maggie Tulliver is a portrait of Marian Evans as a young woman: she has powerful emotions and a strong desire to be educated, and wants a life that is not merely dull and normal.

She will look around a room and see a mother, a father, a brother, articles of furniture, and she thinks: what links them all together? What makes them more than bits and pieces? What’s the meaning of these things?

This is why in my book The Transferred Life of George Eliot I talk about George Eliot’s syntax, not simply in terms of the structure of her sentences, but in some deeper sense as a way of putting things together in your mind. And that’s what Maggie Tulliver is after: links to make some sort of meaning.

But, as Maggie moves from her romantic childhood to the dawn of sexuality, she encounters the difficulty of sexual relationships. This is what Marian Evans had herself struggled with the most.

Maggie meets an attractive man, Stephen Guest, who is already engaged to her cousin. Maggie is a decent person, and she doesn’t want to betray her cousin, but the power of Eros and her own emotional needs are very strong.

What does George Eliot do in The Mill on the Floss ? She creates a situation that’s not autobiographical in the sense that it actually happened, but it’s autobiographical in the sense that it’s the sort of thing that George Eliot and Marian Evans are most interested in. It’s a humiliating middle-ground. That’s to say, Maggie begins to elope with Stephen, but half-way through on board ship, she decides that she can’t go through with it. It is the worst of both worlds: she has lost her reputation but also given up her man.

Almost everyone scorns Maggie when she comes back, other than her mother. This is surprising, because her mother had been completely unimportant in her life, compared to the father whom she adored, just as Marian Evans adored her own father.

But in her great crisis, in her great humiliation, Maggie hears from her mother four words that Marian Evans never heard from her mother: ‘You’ve got a mother’. That’s the link, the love, that Marian Evans herself had never had.

A major focus of The Mill on the Floss is the relationship between Maggie and her brother Tom Tulliver, who is a version of Isaac, George Eliot’s brother in real life. But here for once, it is not the father or the brother who offers the love, but the mother—and Marian Evan’s mother is never really there for her, as we now say.

Can you tell us more about Tom Tulliver?

Tom Tulliver is a hard man. He’s harder than Adam Bede, who was softened by what happened to Hetty and her suffering. Tom is much more rigid. He is practical and Maggie admires him, yet she knows that she is different from him, and in some sense deeper.

Isaac Evans, the brother whom Marian Evans adored, was like this. When Marian Evans formed a relationship with George Henry Lewes, Isaac wouldn’t speak to her. He wouldn’t speak to her until very near the year of her death when, after Lewes died, she married officially for the first time. Then and only then would he make communication.

The hurt of losing the love of Isaac goes very powerfully into The Mill on the Floss . It’s a mixture of admiration for Tom, combined with the counter-judgement that he, in judging her, is wrong.

“For George Eliot, psychology is doubly important because there isn’t anything else – in a world without answers, the great holding ground is within the human psyche, with all of its messiness”

It’s a wonderful conflict between loving someone and having critical thoughts about them that you can’t say out loud, or if you do say them then you’ve forfeited the right for them, simply to be accepted because you’ve done something wrong as well. This is just the sort of messy relationship in which George Eliot was so interested.

In the novel, Maggie and Tom both drown in the great flood.

This is the culmination of the novel. They are in a sort of emotional climax. Maggie begins to voyage in the midst of the flood towards her brother Tom in order to rescue him from drowning. She doesn’t, and they both drown together.

Middlemarch is longer and more narratively complex than Adam Bede .

It’s like several novels in one. It began as two separate novels, one about the town of Middlemarch and its new doctor Lydgate, and another about Dorothea, a young woman who has great intelligence and even greater emotional needs and aspirations.

George Eliot started to join these separate novels together, and to bring in new elements, so that there are four or five things going on at the same time. The wonderful thing about that is the novel stops being linear. Suddenly you move from one character or partnership to another, across the novel rather than along. It is a web shape.

While you’re thinking about the relationship of Dorothea and her scholar husband Casaubon, you are suddenly taken back to the relationship between Lydgate and Rosamond, who (like Hetty in Adam Bede ) is a beautiful but selfish young woman.

It’s as if you are being taught to move from one life to another and you become, as a reader, a sort of novelist: somebody who can understand different people across different classes, ages and genders.

The idea is that, while you read successively, the events being narrated happen simultaneously. It makes you appreciate that there are so many lives interconnected and separated going on at the same time in this little world. It’s only a provincial town, but it’s an image of the whole world.

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That’s why George Eliot has the metaphor of the web—of things interconnecting across different stories. That is the complicated form of Middlemarch which, I would say, must be the greatest novel in the language.

That’s extremely high praise. Why is it the greatest novel in the language?

Because it’s a novel that you would go to in terms of ordinary troubles, troubles of vocation, or marriage, all sorts of purpose and loss and frustration. Here is Dorothea who, in an earlier age, might have been a great religious figure, but there’s no religion and there’s no role for women. So, what happens to that content in a person when they haven’t got form? Here’s Lydgate, a doctor with a strong sense of vocation but with certain weaknesses, particularly sexual weaknesses. Will he manage to do the great thing that he wants to do?

It’s not as if ordinary people simply begin ordinary and remain ordinary. There are extraordinary things that happen, and there are also great disappointments. It’s the hidden story of what doesn’t happen that constantly runs throughout the novel.

In terms of the relationship between Dorothea and Casaubon, Dorothea makes a bad choice in marrying him. She stupidly choses to marry an aged scholar who isn’t anything like the idol she had been looking for. And clearly, sexually, he’s as impotent as he is in his work which he never finally produces.

You feel for Dorothea because Casaubon is unattractive and he’s horrible to her. Yet, George Eliot also manages to make you feel for Casaubon. It’s an almost impossible feat.

This is how your mind is going to be expanded by reading the novel: you feel for Dorothea, you feel for Casaubon, and you feel for both of them almost simultaneously, in the space between them all at the same time.

You’ve talked about George Eliot’s ability to create remarkable switches of perspective. Can you explain how she does that with Casaubon in this novel?

She begins a chapter by simply asking: ‘but why always Dorothea?’ All the neighbours think that Casaubon is dull and unattractive: Dorothea’s sister objects to his blinking eyes and white moles.

But then George Eliot intervenes, and says suppose we turn from outside estimates to wonder what is actually going on within Casaubon. Suddenly you see, for example, that his unkindness to Dorothea when she offers to help him with his work does not constitute a simple rejection. It comes out of his fear that she knows that he’s never going to be able to finish this work. She doesn’t think that—it is his own fear, projected.

So, they are people who should be within inches of each other within their marriage, but are separated across a vast gulf of misunderstanding because her love seems to him like criticism, and his criticism of her seems to be hatred rather than something pitiful.

Dorothea, in the midst of her victimisation, chooses to help him. This is not female submissiveness. She doesn’t love him, she only pities him, but she realises that she is the greater body.

“It’s as if you are being taught to move from one life to another and you become, as a reader, a sort of novelist: somebody who can understand different people across different classes, ages and genders”

Casaubon is going to die, and Dorothea wishes to be ‘the mercy’ for his sorrows. She doesn’t say ‘merciful towards’. She thinks she should be ‘the mercy’, as if there were a thing called mercy that can exist in the world, and should be embodied. So, she thinks that whatever has happened to her, she will be the mercy for Casaubon, as George Eliot often is for her characters.

I like your idea of the reader of Middlemarch learning to appreciate life as a sort of interconnected web. Thinking back to Adam Bede , is that exactly the sort of ability that Hetty lacks?

Yes. Hetty would read novels, if she read at all, to have the fantasy of running off with Arthur. When you read Middlemarch —this novel for grown-ups, as Virginia Woolf says—you get the sense of a complicated human geometry: you move around different angles, perspectives and dimensions.

Beneath the conscious behaviour, or the words that are spoken, lies the depth of the unconscious, the small things that happen in transition. So, suddenly, you’ve got the most powerful working model in fiction of what human life is like. It’s as if somehow George Eliot has found the building blocks—the DNA—of existence. She can see all of that framework, all the underlying stuff, all the different connections, as well as producing the individuality of feeling within each separate person.

This amounts to an almost superhuman activity: to be able to feel with people, but to criticise them; to be able to imagine radically different people, while seeing how radically different they are; to be able to put them together in a marriage and feel for them both at the same time. It’s constantly creating a content that bursts through simple containers and makes you have to think more difficult things than are quite comfortable.

To give just one example, in the marriage between Lydgate and Rosamond, the doctor knows they’re in financial difficulties and asks his wife to economise. Rosamond doesn’t want to do that and she takes no notice. Lydgate desperately wants to keep their marriage together although he knows that it is falling apart.

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We read that ‘his marriage would be a mere piece of bitter irony if they could not go on loving each other’. And then comes this devastating sentence: ‘In marriage, the certainty, “She will never love me much”, is easier to bear than the fear, “I shall love her no more”’.

He daren’t think to himself that he will love her no more. He daren’t even think the sentences that George Eliot’s syntax is producing, though they are there in his own consciousness.

Your last recommendation is J W Cross’s George Eliot’s Life . Who was Johnny Cross and what was his relationship to George Eliot?

Johnny Cross was a young friend to George Henry Lewes and George Eliot—or Marian Lewes, as she was known then—and almost had the status of a nephew. When Lewes died, she spent more time with Johnny Cross who comforted her. They read Dante together and Tennyson’s ‘In Memoriam’, as part of a process of mourning and seclusion.

She had waited so long to find someone and then she lost Lewes. She always needed someone to lean on. Although Johnny Cross was decades younger than her, she turned to him and married him.

It was the first formal legal marriage she had. That’s when Isaac Evans wrote to congratulate her, twenty years too late.

There was a terrible incident in Venice on their honeymoon when Cross, who was a depressive, threw himself out of the window. Some people think—we can never know for sure—that he didn’t want to sexually consummate the marriage. If that were true—and I hope it isn’t—then that must have been a terrible experience for George Eliot. She had gone full circle—still ugly, as she had always feared she was.

Whatever the truth of that particularly story, Johnny Cross later wrote the life of George Eliot. The great achievement of this work is that there is very little written by Cross himself. He tried to create a surrogate autobiography, by compiling three volumes of letters and diary entries in chronological order, from Marian Evans through to George Eliot.

“We write biographies as if they could take the place of novels, yet they can’t: novels offer more truths than biographies ever can”

In George Eliot’s Life , you begin to read between the lines. It’s as if you’ve got the original text, and you have to guess; he doesn’t fill in the gaps. You begin to see the suffering of Marian Evans. There are some details, such as sexual details, that he omits, but nonetheless you get the general feel of the struggle that she had in those first 37 or 38 years to grow up, to find a life, and to be somebody.

George Eliot always said she didn’t want a biography, and that she wouldn’t write an autobiography. The only reason for ever having either, she said, would be if it showed an equivalent person that despite and because of all of their struggles, they could make something of themselves. Well, that’s what you can feel, particularly in the first of the three volumes.

Cross’s approach has served as a model for me, as a biographer. I think biographies are often bad fiction. We fill in the gaps and offer explanations and get all chummy. We write biographies as if they could take the place of novels , yet they can’t: novels offer more truths than biographies ever can.

Like Cross, I try in my own book to use as many of George Eliot’s words as possible. But I reuse the words not only from her diaries and letters, but also from the literature itself, because the deepest biography is always going to be that which gets into the heartfelt mentality of the author.

I like to think that there could be a George Eliot part of us that looks out from within our lives, in lieu of God, trying to do passionately informed thinking in relation to oneself and others. That’s what the novelist does, and I would like the novelist to be taken seriously as a producer of the deepest form of human thinking that there is.

November 6, 2017

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Philip Davis

Philip Davis is the author of The Transferred Life of George Eliot ,  The Victorians 1830-1880 , and a companion volume on  Why Victorian Literature Still Matters . He has written on Shakespeare, Samuel Johnson, the literary uses of memory from Wordsworth to Lawrence, and various books on reading. His previous literary biography was a life of Bernard Malamud. He is general editor of the Literary Agenda paperback series from OUP, on the future of literary studies, for which he wrote R eading and the Reader. He is also editor of  The Reader  magazine, the written voice of the outreach organisation  The Reader .

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