Clare Carlisle's book The Marriage Question: George Eliot's Double Life is a deeply detailed and insightful literary biography of Mary Anne Evans aka Marian Evans aka George Eliot (1819-1880), the extraordinary British novelist who "married" — but not in the eyes of the law or society — the love of her life, George Lewes. Carlisle's analysis of Eliot's maculate situation is fascinating and raises profound, important questions about life. As the book's synopsis says:

... 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. ...

And there are indeed so many questions, including:

• how (and how much) should social norms, civil or religious laws, and moral standards bind people to their marriage vows?
• what should a married couple do if one of them changes radically and is no longer the person they once (or never) were?
• must wives and husbands hide domestic suffering in their marriage from outsiders?
• can people within a marriage love others — and if so, how and how much?

Carlisle in her Preface touches upon such issues and their relevance today, more than a century later:

... how do you tell the difference between protectiveness and control, between love and selfishness, between loyalty and submission? Who has compromised more, sacrificed more, suffered more? Who has the most power? ... Many of the themes [Eliot] explores in her art — desire, dependence, trust, violence, sanctity — could be transferred to wider, less traditional ideas of married life. ... Eliot's unusual circumstances brought her closer to a modern experience of marriage. She was involved with several men before settling down with a long-term partner in her mid-thirties. She chose not to have children, and navigated relationships with Lewes's sons. Within a few years of her married life she was earning much more than her husband. Living at once inside marriage and outside its conventions, she could experience this form of life — so familiar yet also so perplexing — from both sides. A successful marriage was never, for this woman, an easy lapse into social conformity, but a precarious balancing act — and people were watching to see if she would fall.

Earlier in the preface, via rich metaphors, Carlisle sketches the reality of long-term relationships:

Marriage is made of these intimate and ephemeral moments, yet it also has epic proportions. It stretches out through time, into the future, growing and changing: that is why George Eliot had to write grand novels such as Middlemarch to bring it into view. Like a plant, a long-term relationship has its phases of development, its cycles, its seasons, its changing weather. Under adverse conditions, it might wither and die; it might come close to death and then revive. When we imagine a marriage like this, we think about how it is connected with other living things — other people, other relationships — and rooted in an ecosystem. Victorian philosophers learned to call this ecosystem a 'milieu' or 'environment'. We could also call it a world: a mixture of natural, social and cultural conditions.

Getting together with another person means stepping into their world: their family, friendships, culture, career path, ambitions; the places they know and the possibilities they contemplate; their taste and style and habits. Being in a marriage — legal or otherwise — means living in a shared world. We might even say that the marriage is this shared world: again, something that grows and changes.

... beautiful, thoughtful, provocative!

_{(cf My Religion (2000-11-06), Barrett and Browning (2001-11-11), Interracial Checkmate (2004-07-20), Painting vs Writing (2006-03-29), Love and Marriage (2007-08-01), Passage to India - Love and Marriage (2017-10-30), Hearing the Grass Grow (2020-02-08), ...) - ^z - 2023-09-12}

PS And there's also arch humor, as in Chapter 11 ("The Other Shore") where Carlisle breaks the fourth wall in discussing Eliot's marriage, two years after Lewes death in 1878, to John Cross, 20 years younger than she:

When he reaches this part of the book, my editor is shocked. He has been filled with admiration for Eliot — so gifted, so brave, so thoughtful and profound — and now I am suggesting that she married John Cross so that he would write her biography and have her buried in Westminster Abbey. He does not like it at all. Why must we ascribe to her such mercenary motives? No!' I cry — it comes out louder than I meant it to — and explain that of course her reasons were mixed: she liked Cross, genuinely cared for him, probably fancied him too. My editor is still frowning. Usually I am rather in awe of him, but now I launch into a vehement speech. Why does anyone get married? people don't choose a partner just for their intrinsic qualities, but for the whole world they bring. Very often marriage promises some change for the better: an end to loneliness, alleviation of hardship, escape from parental control, the kudos of an attractive or successful spouse, a nicer home, a new social circle, the prospect of children, help with life's practicalities, creative inspiration . . . When a relationship seems to be reduced to such extrinsic motives, we are quick to judge it harshly. But this is not how I see Eliot's marriage to Cross at all! I pause for breath. 'So say all that! he says with a sweep of the hand, and of course I follow his advice.

While Romanticism bursts through conventional moral codes, it carries a moralism of its own — an urge to purify marriage of its self-interest, its worldliness, its pragmatism. I am sure that ambition, mixed with love and loneliness, provided Eliot with a motive for marrying Cross — just as a similar mixture had led her to choose Lewes. Like my editor, she disapproved of this particular motive, and devised a marriage plot that carefully concealed it.

Ha!