I finished this biography of George Eliot appreciating for the first time how courageous and brilliant she was. I had loved several of her novels (Middlemarch, Silas Marner, The Mill on The Floss) when I was a student, but I knew almost nothing of her life until I read Clare Carlisle’s book, The Marriage Question.

In 1854, Marian Evans (as she was then) took the decision to elope with a married man, George Henry Lewes. It is hard, nearly two centuries later, to understand how much scandal and rejection her commitment to Lewes provoked. She was for a time ostracized by family, friends, and “polite society”, and only the celebrity that came with the success of her writing in the 1860s helped to mitigate some of the effects of her “marriage” to Lewes.

Claire Carlisle is an academic and philosopher, and is particularly good at explaining Eliot’s intellectual development and the influence that philosophers such as Hegel and Spinoza had on her thinking and work. Carlisle’s insistence that ideas about “marriage” are the key to understanding Eliot’s novels is, in my view, overstated, but she is a sensitive reader of the key works. I recommend this book without reservation, but it will appeal most to those who know and love the Eliot canon.