The Marriage Question: George Eliot’s Double Life; by Clare Carlisle; Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 400 pp., $30.00 In 1855, Eliot wrote to a friend: “If there be any one subject on which I feel no ...

“A marriage is so hideously private,” the novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch wrote in 1978. “Whoever illicitly draws back that curtain may well be stricken, and in some way that he can least ...

It’s a very Kierkegaardian moment, one of several in her book: unashamedly subjective, lyrical, impassioned and impatient with the buttoned-up, life-denying formality of conventional philosophy – ...

Clare Carlisle is a professor of philosophy at King’s College London. Her books include Philosopher of the Heart: The Restless Life of Søren Kierkegaard and The Marriage Question: George Eliot’s ...

When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission. Early in life, the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard was bestowed the nickname gaflen, or “fork,” ...

Carlisle (On Habit), reader in philosophy and theology at King’s College London, makes an intimidatingly chilly and mercurial figure relatable to readers in this admirable biography. By weaving Søren ...

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Clare Carlisle’s wonderful new biography of Søren Kierkegaard is not an easy read. If you are simply looking for the facts of Kierkegaard’s life, Alas­tair Hannay’s Kierkegaard: A Biography or Stephen ...