I'm Christopher Leiden. This is Open Source. The question is marriage. The answer in this

podcast is Claire Carlyleaux's sparkling book on George Eliot's Double Life. George

Eliot, born Mary Ann Evans, was the towering novelist of Middle Marge,

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 that she loved, and for 24 years called her husband. Claire Carlyleaux, he was an astonishing

feat that George Eliot pulled off in Victorian England. It's another considerable feat of

yours to fill out for modern readers, the question that she and George Lewis were exploring

together. Can you frame that question for us?

Well, the marriage question is the title of my book, and I guess it's not just one question,

but many questions that are lived over the course of a long relationship. And I talk about

how George Eliot's marriage questions grow and change over the course of her experience,

but I guess a really fundamental question is, what is a marriage and what's its role in making

our lives meaningful?

My impression, short form, is that this Mary Ann Evans, known as George Eliot, was running

a sort of lab school for marriages, keeping a journal on her own unlicensed 24-year marriage

by her own rules with George Lewis. At at the same time, she's writing these continuous

series of piercing, popular, classic novels driven by the many marriage questions, as you

say, whether to marry, whom to marry, how to steer a marriage toward life and bliss, and

sometimes whether to stay married, how modern is she? She feels very modern to me, all of

a sudden.

Yeah, me too. I mean, that's one of the reasons why I thought she was the ideal person and

...