A Times Telegraph TLS and Prospect Book of the YearWinner of the 2024 PEN Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for BiographyThe best book Ive read on George Eliot John Carey Sunday TimesAn exceptional new biography that shows how George Eliot wrestled with the question of marriage in art and lifeWhen she was in her midthirties Marian Evans transformed herself into George Eliot an author celebrated for her genius as soon as she published her debut novel. During those years she also found her life partner George Lewes writer philosopher and married father of three. After eloping to Berlin in 1854 they lived together for twentyfour years Eliot asked people to call her Mrs Lewes and dedicated each novel to her Husband. Though they could not legally marry she felt herself initiated into the great experience of marriage this double life which helps me to feel and think with double strength. The relationship scandalized her contemporaries yet she grew immeasurably within it. Living at once inside and outside marriage Eliot could experience this form of life so familiar yet also so perplexing from both sides.In The Marriage Question Clare Carlisle reveals Eliot to be not only a great artist but a brilliant philosopher who probes the tensions and complexities of a shared life. Through the immense ambition and dark marriage plots of her novels we see Eliot wrestling in art and in life with themes of desire and sacrifice motherhood and creativity trust and disillusion destiny and chance. Reading them afresh Carlisles searching new biography explores how marriage questions grow and change and joins Eliot in her struggle to marry thought and feeling.