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Books

The Holy Heresies of George Eliot

Her greatest rebellion against Victorian moralism was to reclaim the
sacred for herself.

By James Wood

September 4, 2023

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Two people lying with their faces close to each other with their long
hair flowing over an open book
When the novelist turned away from holy writ, marriage--and the
sanctified text of the novel--became the center of her moral universe.
Illustration by Fabien Corre
Save this story
Save this story

"Literature bores me, especially great literature," the narrator of
one of John Berryman's "Dream Songs" says. George Eliot sometimes
bores me, especially the George Eliot draped in greatness. Think of
the extremities of nineteenth-century fiction: labile Lermontov;
crazy, visionary Melville; nasty, world-hating Flaubert; mystic
moor-bound Brontes; fanatical, trembling Dostoyevsky; explosive
Hamsun. There's enough wildness to destroy the myth of that stable
Victorian portal "classic realism." It was not classic--certainly not
then--and not always particularly "real." Instead, it was a storm of
madness, extravagant allegory, tyrannical ambition, violent
religiosity, violent atheism. Amid this tableau, at the calm median
of the century's religious belief and its unbelief, is wise, generous
George Eliot: the saintly oracle consulted and visited by young Henry
James and many other important admirers (Wagner, Emerson, Turgenev),
sitting on her moral throne like a more interesting Queen Victoria
(the Queen was, in fact, one of her eager readers), in her
distinguished house in Northwest London, named, fittingly, the
Priory.

It was this George Eliot whom Virginia Woolf had in mind when she
wrote, in 1919, that the long-faced, oracular Victorian had become,
for Woolf's generation, "one of the butts for youth to laugh at."
When George Eliot became respectable, she became very respectable
indeed. In the eighteen-seventies, at the height of her career, she
received visitors at the Priory on Sunday afternoons. Her devoted
husband, George Henry Lewes, who was known to call his wife Madonna
and these Sunday audiences "religious services," bossily hovered and
hosted, sometimes drawing guests to his study, where, beneath a
portrait of the novelist, her manuscripts were covered, shrinelike,
by a curtain. This George Eliot was not only the celebrated author of
"Adam Bede" (1859), "The Mill on the Floss" (1860), and "Middlemarch"
(1871) but the purveyor of "Wise, Witty and Tender Sayings" (1872), a
briskly selling book of extracts from her work compiled and prefaced
by a young devotee who thanked her for having "sanctified the Novel
by making it the vehicle for the grandest and most uncompromising
moral truth."

Even now, in a world of quite different pieties, it can be difficult
to disinter George Eliot from our reverence, to rediscover the writer
who had enough radical daring and agnostic courage to take on the
whole sniffing righteousness of Victorian England. Clare Carlisle's
eloquent and original book, "The Marriage Question: George Eliot's
Double Life" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), allows us to do that, by
placing at the center of her inquiry the abiding preoccupation and
scandal of George Eliot's life and work: marriage. In an age that
sanctified marriage, George Eliot was nearly the most sublimely
married person in the land. In her letters and journals, in the
manuscripts she unceasingly dedicated to her husband, she gave thanks
for her marital fortune, for the beautifully sympathetic "double
life" she shared with George Lewes, a distinguished essayist and
thinker in his own right. Her journals describe the tranquillity of
their shared days in London, or deep in the English countryside, or
travelling in Germany and Italy: mornings reserved for writing, a
walk or a museum visit in the afternoon, evenings for reading, often
aloud to each other--a strenuous ease she called "a happy solitude a
deux."

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Yet George Eliot wasn't legally married to George Lewes, who was
separated from, but could not divorce, his wife, Agnes Jervis. George
Eliot wasn't always George Eliot, either: she was Marian Evans when
she first eloped for the Continent with Lewes, in July of 1854,
escaping English judgment for European indifference. Born as Mary
Anne Evans in 1819, the same year as the future Queen Victoria, she
grew up in the rural Midlands, a settled and conservative region that
she would later fictionalize as Loamshire--the stubborn stomach of
England, slow to digest politics into action. Her father, whose
formal education was basic, was a shrewd and trusted estate manager
for an aristocratic Warwickshire family. Mary Anne's brother, Isaac,
apparently as averse to change as his father, succeeded him in the
same job. But Mary Anne couldn't stay put. She was a restless reader
who had an aptitude for languages (one of her early crushes was on a
private tutor who taught her Italian and German), and she possessed,
even as a teen-ager, the kind of scorching, radical austerity that
turns intellectuals into prophetic outsiders, a status she awarded to
several of her fictional protagonists--Maggie Tulliver, Dorothea
Brooke, and Daniel Deronda. The adolescent Mary Anne was herself a
fervently pious evangelical, seething with Calvinist fatalism, wary
of non-sacred music, and forswearing her attraction to her tutor by
quoting a verse from the Book of Isaiah: "Cease ye from man."

But on Sunday, January 2, 1842, something wondrous and strange
occurred. As if the new year demanded from her a new soul, the
twenty-two-year-old Mary Anne Evans, who still lived at home as her
father's housekeeper, announced that she would not go to church. In
the nineteenth century, there were at least three reliable germs of
religious doubt; all three infected some people at once. You might
brood over theodicy (how to reconcile God's supposedly providential
goodness with the pain of the world); you might brood over evolution
and the long history of the world (this sometimes overlapping with
theodicean anxieties, since the long history of the world would
appear to be an epic of suffering and extinction); and you might
start reading the Bible stories as if they were stories, rather than
divine revelation. Mary Anne Evans succumbed to the third illness.
Around this time, she read Charles Hennell's "Enquiry Concerning the
Origin of Christianity," published three years earlier, and concluded
that the Biblical accounts of Jesus' ministry were "histories
consisting of mingled truth and fiction."

The Scriptures might not be divinely authoritative, she told her
bewildered father, but there was much about Jesus' moral teaching
that she found admirable. Here was the characteristic overcorrection
of the mid-century: a slightly nervous compensation for sudden loss,
like overpraising a relative at his funeral. The German scholar David
Friedrich Strauss similarly compensates for the loss of God in his
immensely influential revaluation of the Biblical narratives, "The
Life of Jesus, Critically Examined" (1835); Ernest Renan does the
same in his popular biography "The Life of Jesus" (1863). The air had
gone out of the theology, but the moral cushions could still be
plumped up. That inflation repelled Nietzsche, who, in "Twilight of
the Idols" (1889), attacks George Eliot as one of those Victorian
moralists who have "got rid of the Christian God, and now feel
obliged to cling all the more firmly to Christian morality."

Renan, a flowery stylist who splashes consoling perfume over Christ's
corpse as he flees, deserves Nietzsche's hammer. But George Eliot was
intensely sincere in both her agnosticism and her moralism. And, more
than just sincere, she was strict, searching, systematic, scholarly.
She had thought her way into evangelicalism; now she thought her way
out of Christian belief. She translated David Strauss in the
eighteen-forties. In the early eighteen-fifties, she would translate
Ludwig Feuerbach's "The Essence of Christianity" (originally
published in German, in 1841), a prescient work in the literature of
atheism which argues with a brisk and almost jaunty logic that the
love of God is really just the love of man; that we project onto the
divine those qualities which we cherish in ourselves. And she read
Baruch Spinoza, beginning in the eighteen-forties with the Dutch
philosopher's "Theological-Political Treatise" (originally published
in 1670) and moving on to the "Ethics" (1677), which she arduously
translated from the Latin in the mid-eighteen-fifties.

Spinoza was infamous for his sometimes inscrutable variety of
pantheism, in which God no longer sits outside Nature, paring his
fingernails (James Joyce's joke), but effectively is Nature,
inextricable from it. The supernatural, miracle-working,
interventionist God, loaded up with human attributes and projections,
slips away into Nature. For all practical religious purposes--prayer,
comfort, salvation, immortality--Spinoza kills off God, as many humans
would understand the notion. Spinoza was excommunicated by the Jewish
community of Amsterdam in 1656, and could probably still get himself
excommunicated somewhere today. But he had his own way of
compensating for theological lack, and its clearest articulation is
to be found in his earlier work the "Theological-Political Treatise."
In that incandescent text, Spinoza argues, among other things, that
the Biblical miracles were not miraculous; that divinity is at bottom
the moral law; that the essence of that law consists of loving God
and loving one's neighbor; that right living therefore has nothing to
do with one's beliefs or doctrines but is simply a matter of obeying
and piously enacting the law; and that this law is divinely inscribed
in our hearts. All of which raises the haunting question of whether
this universal moral law needs Scripture or the Almighty at all. Does
the Good need God--or, rather, "God"? Not for a twentieth-century
writer like Iris Murdoch, a novelist who is, in some ways, George
Eliot's nearest intellectual successor, and who writes, "The image of
the Good as a transcendent, magnetic centre seems to me the least
corruptible and most realistic picture for us to use in our
reflections upon the moral life." George Eliot was always drawn to
the magnetic center of the Good. It's easy to see how appealing this
kind of idea might have seemed to an intensely religious, morally
provoked, and theologically dispossessed Victorian intellectual, one
who was, furthermore, not many years away from attempting to write
her own kind of Scripture, Scripture in a different, newer language:
the sanctified novel.

This was the writer and thinker who crossed paths with George Lewes,
in a Piccadilly bookshop, in 1851: fierce, unrespectable, uninsured.
She had arrived in London at the start of that year, had changed her
name to Marian, and by the end of it was the de-facto editor of the
capital's leading progressive journal, The Westminster Review. During
the next few years, she published there a series of brilliant essays,
the most exciting of which belongs in the annals of anti-religious
complaint, her decapitation of the evangelical preacher Dr. Cumming,
with its devastating opener: "Given, a man with moderate intellect, a
moral standard not higher than the average, some rhetorical affluence
and great glibness of speech, what is the career in which, without
the aid of birth or money, he may most easily attain power and
reputation in English society?"

One can forget what a funny satirist George Eliot was. In "Adam
Bede," for instance, the once religious writer, who knew exactly how
dreary Sundays could be, tells us that even the farmyard animals
appeared to recognize the Sabbath: "The cocks and hens seemed to know
it, and made only crooning subdued noises; the very bull-dog looked
less savage, as if he would have been satisfied with a smaller bite
than usual." Anyone who has read "Middlemarch" remembers these
formidable words about Mr. Casaubon, the parched parson and scholar:
"With his taper stuck before him he forgot the absence of windows,
and in bitter manuscript remarks on other men's notions about the
solar deities, he had become indifferent to the sunlight." But
funnier and more compact is this addition, several paragraphs later:
" 'Yes,' said Mr Casaubon, with that peculiar pitch of voice which
makes the word half a negative." Casaubon, though, is almost
avuncular when set alongside the loathsome Henleigh Grandcourt, from
"Daniel Deronda" (1876). Like Henry James's Gilbert Osmond,
Grandcourt is terrifying in his very calm, "a handsome lizard," a
bully incapable of love who speaks to his abused wife, Gwendolen, in
"an adagio of utter indifference." And he has many dogs: "Grandcourt
kept so many dogs that he was reputed to love them."

Carlisle vividly animates this dangerous writer, and sets before us,
in her early chapters, the young woman of letters before she became
"George Eliot"--the tyro editor glimpsed, for instance, by a colleague
on The Westminster Review, correcting proofs in the evenings, sitting
sideways in an easy chair with her legs over the arms, and her long
hair over her shoulders. Lewes might have seemed her opposite, at
least temperamentally. He was buoyant and confident; she was given to
despondency and uncertainty. He was the kind of journalist who could
write about anything, and did so; her work has a holy coherence. But,
as Marian wrote in a letter, Lewes's flippancy masked great
conscience and heart. And they had shared intellectual and literary
interests, particularly in philosophy and contemporary German
thought. Like Marian, George Lewes had studied Spinoza with the
utmost admiration. In his popular and still very readable "
Biographical History of Philosophy" (1845-46), Lewes praised Spinoza
for creating a body of thought that had been accused for nearly two
centuries of the most wicked blasphemy but that had turned out, in
the past sixty years, to become "the acknowledged parent of a whole
nation's philosophy," by which he meant Germany's.

He and Marian read slightly different Spinozas, Carlisle suggests.
Lewes used Spinoza to confirm his atheism, while Marian used him to
question her faith. Lewes wrote that Spinoza was not one of those
philosophers who "deride or vilify human nature: in his opinion it
was better to try to understand it." Marian would continue to play
the serious agnostic to her husband's unruffled atheist. And perhaps
she was always the austere religionist to his worldly humanist. The
humanist takes human nature as it comes; the religionist tries to
improve it, starting with herself. George Eliot's novels are full of
personal renunciations and reformations. Adam Bede wins the joyous
ending of marrying Dinah Morris only by undergoing a moral
transformation that earns an authorial blessing churchy enough to
sound like something from the marriage service itself: "What greater
thing is there for two human souls, than to feel that they are joined
for life--to strengthen each other in all labour, to rest on each
other in all sorrow, to minister to each other in all pain, to be one
with each other in silent unspeakable memories at the moment of the
last parting?" Both Rosamond Vincy and Gwendolen Harleth, in
"Middlemarch" and "Daniel Deronda," respectively, learn to become
better people by, essentially, wanting less. Carlisle, indeed, offers
the rather brilliant insight that the relationship between Dorothea
Brooke and her less morally intense sister Celia, in "Middlemarch,"
may echo an element of Eliot's marriage to Lewes: Lewes as Celia,
content enough to take reality as it is, and Eliot as Dorothea,
impatient to change it.

There were plenty of English Victorians, Christian at least in their
self-reckoning, who wanted to improve Marian Evans's behavior, once
the news emerged that she was living with a man who was not her legal
husband. Her brother, Isaac, did not communicate with his sister for
the next twenty-three years, breaking his silence only after George
Lewes's death, to commend her legal marriage to Lewes's sapless
successor, a banker named John Cross. Twenty-three years represented
the heart of Eliot's literary career, the two decades in which she
became the country's most admired novelist. Even some of those
admirers were squeamish. Elizabeth Gaskell, writing to Eliot to
praise her work, couldn't avoid adding, "I wish you were Mrs
Lewes . . . still, it can't be helped." Eliot and Lewes held their
"religious" audiences on Sundays not because they were taking
confession but because the business of how to socialize was so
tricky: early in their marriage, Eliot decided that she would guard
herself against slights by refusing all social invitations. When
married men came to the Priory, they almost always came without their
wives.

Carlisle, a philosopher who has written studies of Spinoza and
Kierkegaard, combines a biographer's eye for stories with a
philosopher's nose for questions. Her masterly and enriching study is
based, I think, on two related premises: that marriage is a private
story, about whose intimacies we can only speculate (novels, of
course, and George Eliot's novels preeminently, dramatize those
intimacies for us); and that marriage is also a public story, a
constantly adjusted fable, the propaganda that a household needs in
order to run its little polity. Here are two lives, as James Salter
puts it in his novel of marriage, "Light Years," the one people
believe you are living, and "the other": "It is this other which
causes the trouble, this other we long to see." Both narratives,
private and public, differently restrict our access, so the ideal
historian will need great tact and an impious curiosity. Carlisle has
both. Although she carefully builds on the work of scholars and
writers like Gordon S. Haight, Rosemary Ashton, Phyllis Rose, and,
especially, the subtle investigations of Rosemarie Bodenheimer, she's
unafraid to treat Eliot's undoubtedly happy, successful marriage as
simultaneously a public exercise in happiness and success--and to do
so without cynicism.

One of the loveliest things about George Eliot's life is the calm
confidence with which she slays the dragonish norm-keepers of
Victorian morality. She wrote to her brother's lawyer with gentle
emphasis: "Our marriage is not a legal one, though it is regarded by
us both as a sacred bond." In one sense, it must have seemed as
simple as that. She was blessed to love and be loved by the man she
called her husband. The doubters had to catch up. But it could not be
quite as simple as that. Carlisle has a very sensitive chapter, for
instance, about Eliot's relation to motherhood. She and Lewes had no
children of their own, but Lewes brought with him three sons--Charles,
Thornton, and Bertie--from his previous marriage. Eliot was
painstakingly sincere in her attentions as stepmother to the boys
(who were largely absent, away at boarding school). Playing the right
role as mother, Carlisle acutely suggests, would strengthen Eliot's
claim to be Lewes's wife. She traces the awkward growth of Eliot's
self-appellations. Letters from stepmother were first stiffly signed
"Marian Lewes," then "Mother" (though Eliot enclosed the word in
quotation marks), and finally, Teutonically, "Your loving Mutter,"
which seemed the best compromise. As far as one can tell, it was a
loving and mutually respectful relationship. But Carlisle conveys its
fraughtness. Marian Evans was still young enough to bear children of
her own when Lewes's boys entered her life. We know from her journals
that menstruation regularly brought headaches, fatigue, and
melancholy. (Eliot asterisked her periods.) Perhaps, Carlisle
speculates, her periods also brought chagrin, "a reminder of the
possibility of motherhood and a premonition of the pain and danger of
childbirth."

Motherhood is a thread that runs darkly through Carlisle's book,
because two of the boys, Thornton and Bertie, would die in their
twenties. The Eliot-Lewes household seems to have been able to absorb
their young deaths without severe interruption. In 1869, Eliot
started writing "Middlemarch"--sparkling, witty episodes--while
Thornton was dying in her house. Six years later, in her journals for
1875, she notes Bertie's death in July (he died far from home, in
South Africa), and then almost immediately follows the flat record
with: "the 2 first volumes of Daniel Deronda are in print." Only a
few months after this, on January 1, 1876, she summarizes the current
state of domestic happiness and looks back on the previous year: "All
blessedness except health!" Eliot's marriage was a kind of public
religion, and the religion of her marriage demanded, as Carlisle puts
it, growing happiness and ideal love as the best advertisement for
her decision to defy the rules of propriety. The marriage was too big
to fail. Perhaps, Carlisle boldly muses, "her marriage, and the
creative life that was inseparable from it, could not sustain the
presence of Thornton and Bertie." She goes on to conclude that,
though there's no question of Eliot's devotion to Lewes, it is
"devotion to her art . . . that shines most constantly through the
pages of her diaries and letters." Certainly, the married "double
life" of Carlisle's subtitle can be interpreted in more than one way.
In order to achieve what she did, she had to live the somewhat
clandestine double life of the artist-spy: warm wife in the drawing
room, and absolute writer in the study. Her life was a happy
"solitude a deux," but an imperative solitude nonetheless. (In
"Middlemarch," Eliot brilliantly describes Rosamond's unhappy
marriage to Lydgate as "a yoked loneliness.")

I'm not aware of any other biographical account willing to press this
case with quite this force. By centering the religion of marriage,
Carlisle usefully allows us to read George Eliot's peculiar strain of
religious agnosticism in its light. Eliot's religiosity, the thing
the spitefully unmarried Nietzsche so hated, was inseparable from the
religion of marriage. "The very possibility of a constantly growing
blessedness in marriage is to me the very basis of good in our mortal
life," she wrote to a correspondent. Perhaps the magnetic center of
the Good was no more and no less than the magnet of marriage? Return
to the eloquently calm defense she offered her brother's lawyer: "Our
marriage is not a legal one, though it is regarded by us both as a
sacred bond." It is, Eliot says here, not the letter of the law but
the spirit that is sacred. Inwardness is outwardness. That's George
Eliot's "religion" in a sentence. But which comes first, the belief
in the primacy of inwardness or the belief in the intimacy of
marriage? Either way, the danger, from the viewpoint of official
Victorian Christianity, is that the sacred has been redefined without
ecclesiastical warrant. And if the sacred can be thus redefined then
everything is up for grabs. This emphasis on inwardness is obviously
a kind of Protestantism--in particular, the kind of dissenting
spiritual enthusiasm to which all Protestantism inevitably leads. But
the sentiment is perfectly compatible with Spinoza's theological
ethics. For Spinoza, the summit of the moral law is charity,
loving-kindness, and this moral law is inscribed on our hearts. We
prove ourselves moral, then, not by what we profess but by how we
live, and therefore by how we love; we will be known by the quality
of the marriage that we make with the world, by the moral marriage we
make with our neighbors. That is what Spinoza, who was himself
unmarried, calls "true religion." Everything else is hypocrisy and
superstition.

So there was the religion of marriage, the religion of Spinoza, and
the religion of the novel. That constituted George Eliot's holy
trinity. The novel, after all, was the greatest engine of inwardness
in the nineteenth century, the form that represented but also
produced a godlessly "sacred" interiority. "We all have a better
guide in ourselves," Jane Austen's Fanny Price says, "if we would
attend to it, than any other person can be." Or than any God can be?
George Eliot has Adam Bede voice what is almost a commonplace of the
nineteenth-century novel when he says that "real religion" is not
doctrines (what he calls "notions") but feelings: "It isn't notions
sets people doing the right thing--it's feelings." Throughout the
nineteenth century, we find the novelist waging war with hypocrisies
and doctrines, religious and social, and often with the civil law
that ritualistically enacts them, on behalf of the particularity and
saving inwardness of the stubbornly individual fictional character.
You could say that the nineteenth-century novel is so full of
complicated "characters" precisely because they are so furiously
resisting a society that simplifies them. Women, of course, were most
obviously menaced by society's simplifications. "We don't ask what a
woman does--we ask whom she belongs to," Philip Wakem's father
announces in "The Mill on the Floss." For the novelist, the natural
habitat of these resistant women was marriage. And, as the century
progressed, the thing they were resisting became marriage itself.

As a storyteller, Eliot plots for marriage; it drives all her major
novels. But, inevitably, happy, ideal marriages are barely
represented in her pages. Adam Bede marries Dinah Morris in a brief,
formulaic coda, entitled "Marriage Bells." In "The Mill on the
Floss," Maggie Tulliver (a kind of authorial self-portrait), torn
between a marriage of minds with the physically deformed Philip Wakem
and a marriage of bodies with the dashing Stephen Guest, is granted
neither, and dies chastely in the arms of her brother, Tom. In
"Middlemarch," Dorothea Brooke first marries the wrong man
(Casaubon), then strenuously fights her way into a happy marriage
with the right one, the handsome young radical thinker Will Ladislaw.
But her journey takes the length of the entire novel, and is
summarized only in a quick, again largely formulaic, epilogue.
Likewise, Daniel's morally ideal marriage to Mirah Lapidoth is the
barely glimpsed solution at the very end of "Daniel Deronda," not
part of the book's lived texture. In all these cases, the heroic
marriages are heroic finales, existing outside the structure of the
community that produced them or outside the structure of the novel
that plotted them, and sometimes both. They can be given no more
flesh and blood than Jane Austen awards Elizabeth Bennet's fairy-tale
bliss with Darcy on the last page of "Pride and Prejudice."

Of course, novelists aren't interested in happy marriages but in
unhappy ones--happiness writes white, and so on. Readers of Eliot
vividly remember the unhappy marriages: Casaubon and Dorothea,
Rosamond and Lydgate, Gwendolen and Grandcourt. Still, it's a
tantalizing idea that Eliot idealized happy marriage so powerfully
that she could hardly bear to explore its actualities on the page; as
Austen makes marriage an almost unrepresentable romantic utopia,
Eliot makes marriage an almost unrepresentable moral utopia. Nowhere
is the gap between unhappy actuality and holy fantasy, between flesh
and spirit, more acute than in her last great novel, "Daniel Deronda"
(1876), that strange, fantastical, sometimes boring, and utterly
compelling book. "Daniel Deronda" turns on two marriages, one vividly
recorded and one postponed until the last pages of the book. The
"real" marriage is the vicious failure, the differently yoked
loneliness of Gwendolen and Grandcourt's union; she marries cynically
and in desperation, for money, and has the misfortune to marry an
exquisitely talented bully. Meanwhile, Daniel Deronda, an Englishman
of uncertain parentage who magically turns out to be a Sephardic Jew,
spends the length of the novel on a quest both for his identity and
for his ideal mate, Mirah, a Jewish refugee of great beauty,
physically and spiritually. Indeed, we can see Deronda as a kind of
successful Casaubon, a worldly seeker who finds his Key to all
Mythologies at the religious source: in Judaism. The "real" marriage
in the novel is full of brutal materialities, formidably brought to
life; the "unreal" marriage floats away into the ether, compacted
into a brief epilogue of slightly more than three pages. Daniel is
dreamily seen as Mirah's "rescuing angel"; Mirah can think of life
with Daniel only in Eliot's highest terms, as that "which she could
call by no other name than good." The marriage is almost immaterial.
It can't quite be imagined in an actual England: the couple are about
to set out for "the East." The Good calls them; the magnetic center
is elsewhere.

Eliot would have known better than to poke the long, exploratory
fingers of the novel into the thing she had with Lewes. Perhaps the
great fortune of her marriage, illegal but sacred, seemed so
miraculous and undeserved that she felt as if she were holding her
breath for twenty-four years? We can say with decent confidence that
George Eliot's marriage to George Henry Lewes realized, insofar as
any worldly union can, the Good, here and now and not elsewhere:
together they forged a brazier of love, and warmed themselves at its
flame. Devotion to writing may indeed shine most vividly in Eliot's
correspondence and journals, but it did not displace marital
devotion. Perhaps it even augmented it. Carlisle is struck by the
"quality of devotion" that runs through the marriage, and writes
movingly about its entailments: "It is attention given, work done,
tasks shared, disappointments borne, anger endured, quarrels
forgiven, loss grieved."

In this spirit, Eliot wrote a remarkably beautiful and tender
epigraph for the last chapter--the marriage coda--of "Daniel Deronda":
"In the chequered area of human experience the seasons are all
mingled as in the golden age: fruit and blossom hang together; in the
same moment the sickle is reaping and the seed is sprinkled; one
tends the green cluster and another treads the wine-press. Nay, in
each of our lives harvest and spring-time are continually one, until
Death himself gathers us and sows us anew in his invisible fields."
She published these words in 1876. What did she already apprehend?
Two years later, Death would gather her dear husband, a man about
whom one of her admirers wrote, "The secret of his lovableness was
that he was happy in being kind." 

Published in the print edition of the September 11, 2023, issue, with
the headline "Holy Matrimony."

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  * Why the archives of so many great writers end up in Texas.

  * Fiction by Donna Tartt: "Tam-O'-Shanter"

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James Wood, a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2007, teaches at
Harvard. His latest book is "Serious Noticing," a collection of
essays.

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