This lecture will be in the Victoria Hall only (there will not be a zoom link available)
Clare Carlisle, author of a forthcoming biography of novelist and writer George Eliot, will explore how the question of marriage shaped George Eliot’s life and literature. In the 1850s Eliot caused a scandal with her unconventional choice to live with G. H. Lewes, a married man. She came to see marriage as an unparalleled site for human fulfilment, yet she depicted a series of unhappy, disappointing and abusive marriages in her fiction. This talk will consider Eliot as a philosopher as well as a literary writer, and will ask what she has to teach us about the ‘marriage question’.
Clare Carlisle grew up in Manchester, and studied philosophy and theology at Trinity College, Cambridge, gaining her BA in 1998 and her PhD in 2002. She is the author of six books, most recently On Habit (Routledge, 2014), Philosopher of the Heart: The Restless Life of Søren Kierkegaard ( 2019), and Spinoza’s Religion: A New Reading of the Ethics ( 2021). She is also the editor of George Eliot’s translation of Spinoza’s Ethics. The Marriage Question: George Eliot’s Double Life will be published by Penguin in spring 2023.
Booking opens mid September.
Fees:
Members: Free, Victoria Hall
Non-Members: £5, Victoria Hall
Please book by 1pm on the day of the event