Feminist philosopher Clare Carlisle illuminates George Elliot’s love life as well as the nightmarish marriages in her novels
, Dorothea Brooke, seeking intellectual communion with a like-minded spouse, winds up jealously circumscribed, thwarted and exploited by Casaubon, her pompous husk of a husband., Gwendolen Harleth is assaulted and humiliated sexually by Grandcourt.
At that moment, she was not yet George, but someone else. Born Mary Anne Evans, she also used the name Marian and even Marianne, before assuming the pen name George Eliot, while letting herself be known as Mrs Lewes , and Polly to her beloved . The woman we know as George had more than a double life: she made her way through Victorian patriarchy by any aliases necessary.’s Rochester, Lewes was ugly yet irresistible.
Lena Dunham once tweeted of Eliot that “she was ugly AND horny!”. Let’s hope, but how Dunham would know is beyond me. Eliot took her correspondence with Lewes to her grave in Highgate cemetery. Carlisle’s biography focuses on intellectual rather than sexual fulfilment, depicting Mr and Mrs Lewes reading Dante, Darwin, Hegel and Goethe to one another in the afternoons after mornings spent in their respective studies frenziedly pen-scratching.
Finally, Eliot has got the biographer she deserves, namely an ardent and eloquent feminist philosopher who shows us how and why Eliot’s books, rightly read, are as philosophically profound as any treatise written by a man. Carlisle has edited Eliot’s translation of Spinoza’s“When I studied philosophy at university,” writes Carlisle, “most of the authors I read were unmarried men: Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, Hume, Kant, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein.
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