Mollie Wilson O’Reilly at Commonweal:
In discussing Eliot’s work, it is tempting to pass over the messy details of her private life in delicate embarrassment. (That late-in-life marriage to John Cross, for example, is truly weird.) But Clare Carlisle’s excellent new book The Marriage Question dares to take Eliot’s personal life seriously, as the field in which her finest work was cultivated. And, coming at the end of Carlisle’s empathetic portrait of the woman who called herself Mrs. Lewes, a woman who crowned each of her manuscripts with a sincere dedication to her beloved “husband,” Huxley’s verdict on Eliot’s life lands as an outrageous insult. He had been asked to support her interment in the Abbey, but replied with his reasons for opposing it. “One cannot eat one’s cake and have it too,” he sniffed. “Those who elect to be free in thought and deed must not hanker after the rewards, if they are to be so called, which the world offers to those who put up with its fetters.”
Could any woman hope to be “free in thought and deed” in 1850s England?
more here.