The question is marriage. The answer in this podcast is Clare Carlisle’s sparkling book, The Marriage Question: George Eliot’s Double Life. George Eliot, born Marian Evans, was the towering novelist of Middlemarch, Silas Marner, and more. She put a man’s name on her author’s page. She built very nearly a religion on her foundational ideas about marriage, yet she never married the man she loved and for 24 years called her husband.

Clare Carlisle.

It was an astonishing feat that George Eliot pulled off in Victorian England. It’s another considerable feat of Clare Carlisle’s to fill out for modern readers the question that she and George Lewes were exploring together.