The Marriage Question Quotes

“the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.’ Here Eliot leaves us with a vision of a world where acts are unhistoric and tombs unvisited, assuring us that it is ‘not so ill’ as it ‘might have been’. This is not merely the fictional world of Middlemarch: it is our world too. And by suggesting that its incomplete (‘growing’) goodness is only partly dependent on, half owing to, those hidden lives that the novel has brought to light, she gestures off-stage — or off-page — to some other possible source of goodness.”
― Clare Carlisle, The Marriage Question: George Eliot's Double Life

“I don’t consider myself as a teacher, but a companion in the struggle of thought,’ Eliot wrote to a friend in 1875, as she worked on her last novel. Writing fiction, she found creative ways to address deep questions: rather than personifying ideas or telling didactic stories, she philosophized through her art. Her willingness to think in the medium of human relations and emotions, and to carry out that thinking in images, symbols and archetypes, expands the canonical view of philosophy that is embedded in universities — institutions that systematically excluded women until the twentieth century. Eliot once reflected that her friend Herbert Spencer, a prominent Victorian philosopher, had an ‘inadequate endowment of emotion’ which made him ‘as good as dead’ to large swathes of human experience, thereby weakening his arguments and theories. She might as well have been talking about philosophy itself. Her own philosophical style is compassionate, subversive, seasoned with humour, and enriched by an attentiveness in which fleeting moments — a glance, a touch, a flush of feeling — become significant.”
― Clare Carlisle, The Marriage Question: George Eliot's Double Life

“In some religious traditions there is a belief that at the end of their life each person is judged by God, and rewarded or punished accordingly. This can sound like a threat, but perhaps it is good to believe that judgement must be withheld until a life is whole, and that only an omniscient being is able to judge truly. If we imagine how much God would see of a single life — every thought, every feeling, every experience, every word that is heard and spoken — it becomes clear that our own judgements are based on very partial knowledge of a tiny fraction of another person’s life. God would examine how a life is entwined with the lives growing around it. He would look at the whole milieu that formed it, and at tangled roots reaching deep underground. His judgement would not be cluttered and confused, as ours is, by a strange mixture of ideas about how human beings are supposed to behave.”
― Clare Carlisle, The Marriage Question: George Eliot's Double Life

“forbidden”
― Clare Carlisle, The Marriage Question: George Eliot's Double Life

“In 1980, one hundred years after her death, George Eliot was finally admitted to Westminster Abbey. A stone was laid for her in Poets’ Corner, squeezed between memorials to Dylan Thomas and W. H. Auden. Here she is remembered as Mary Ann Evans, as well as George Eliot — a choice of names that represents a greater portion of her sixty-one years while setting aside both her marriages”
― Clare Carlisle, The Marriage Question: George Eliot's Double Life

“The most important thing, she told Oscar Browning — a flamboyant Eton schoolmaster who had become her devoted friend — was to ‘make a few lives near to us better than they would have been without our presence in the world’.”
― Clare Carlisle, The Marriage Question: George Eliot's Double Life

“the line between the virtuous and vicious, so far from being a necessary safeguard to morality, is itself an immoral fiction.”
― Clare Carlisle, The Marriage Question: George Eliot's Double Life

“It would have been easier to defy convention if she was aristocratic, bohemian, insouciant — more like George Sand, in other words — and not a lower-middle-class woman from a conservative Anglican family, who harboured ‘a desire insatiable for the esteem of my fellow creatures’.”
― Clare Carlisle, The Marriage Question: George Eliot's Double Life

“Some of Eliot’s biographers have speculated about her sex life with Lewes, but we know almost nothing about it.”
― Clare Carlisle, The Marriage Question: George Eliot's Double Life

“From her youth to her last years she wrestled with what her generation called the Woman Question: how should a woman live in a patriarchal world?”
― Clare Carlisle, The Marriage Question: George Eliot's Double Life

“Her literary achievement was so immense that her successors felt bound to break the form of the novel in order to move beyond her.”
― Clare Carlisle, The Marriage Question: George Eliot's Double Life