Lewes adopted the pseudonym George Eliot, and several years later, she was a nationwide sensation, beloved even by Queen Victoria. Lewes who first encouraged his gifted wife to try her hand at fiction. “Every day’s experience seems to deepen the voice of foreboding that has long been telling me, ‘The bliss of reciprocated affection is not allotted to you under any form,’” she wrote. Though her figure was slender and graceful, she had a large manly nose, a long chin, ‘evasive’ grey-blue eyes,” and, worst of all, “a formidable intellect and a brooding, sensitive disposition.” As her 21st birthday loomed, she began to grow pessimistic about her prospects. “At a party,” Carlisle reports, “she stood in a corner, unable to join in the dancing and flirting.” At no point could she forget that she fell “far short of the feminine ideal. Throughout her youth, she was awkward and self-conscious. First, she developed unreciprocated feelings for her German and Italian tutor later, she fell head over heels for the scientist (and notorious social Darwinist) Herbert Spencer, again to no avail. Her mother died when she was 16, and her sister married early, leaving her to weather a series of stinging romantic rejections alone. It passes quickly over Eliot’s birth in 1819 and picks up steam when she is a lovelorn teenager languishing in the British countryside. Luckily, Carlisle’s latest fares better as a work of partial biography than as a work of philosophy.
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