Anna Christensen

NonfictionWomen's HistoryHistory

The Cure for Women

Review by Anna Christensen

When Charlotte Perkins Gilman published “The Yellow Wallpaper” in 1892, it was a resounding hit among Victorian readers. What many did not know was that the story was a fictionalized account of Gilman’s own experience with the madness-inducing “rest cure” popular among doctors at the time, used to subdue any sort of mental or emotional complaint brought to their attention by women—or by their husbands. Gilman, in the throes of postpartum depression after the birth of her daughter, had undergone the treatment, which unsurprisingly offered her no relief, while in the care of Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell. She did eventually find relief, however—not at the hands of the male doctors who brushed off her symptoms, but with the help of one of the first eminent female physicians in America, Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi.

Lydia Reeder’s monumental The Cure for Women: Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi and the Challenge to Victorian Medicine That Changed Women’s Lives Forever recounts the incredible life and achievements of her subject. Somewhere between Jacobi’s adventures in wartime Paris during her medical school days, her unrelenting efforts to open the doors of first-class medical schools to women, and her dogged work for women’s suffrage, she conducted research into women’s menstrual cycles by collecting data from women themselves—the first time any doctor or scientist had done so. As demonstrated by Gilman’s case, Jacobi treated her patients by listening to them and accepting them as fellow partners in their own health.

Jacobi’s research compelled other women to follow; Reeder notes that today, 60% of practicing physicians under the age of 35 are women. Yet it is possible to draw a direct line from the now obviously absurd and cruel “cures” Victorian doctors prescribed for women and the many ways that women’s health care remains lacking 150 years later. Neuroscientists are still confronting research effected by biological determinism and gender essentialism that echo the Victorian belief that women’s abilities are limited by their biology. By restoring Jacobi’s fascinating story to the forefront of the historical imagination, Reeder returns to us a much-needed, inspiring voice that is equally suited to our current moment in time.

 

Lydia Reeder celebrates the female physician who debunked sexist Victorian-era medicine in The Cure for Women.
NonfictionSelf-Help

How to Winter

Review by Anna Christensen

When the first white flurries twirl on the frosty air where I live, I am instantly transported back to my 7-year-old self, running off to find my snow boots and mittens. But for many others, winter’s inexorable return means a depressing lack of light, bone-cold mornings and messy roads. Kari Leibowitz’s How to Winter: Harness Your Mindset to Thrive on Cold, Dark, or Difficult Days offers a guide for discovering the magic of the season. 

Leibowitz once counted herself among those who dreaded the onslaught of frigid air, precipitation and fading light, admitting that “as a high school senior, I used to refuse to drive my little brother—a freshman—to class unless he preheated my car to a toasty warmth each morning.” Years later, as a psychologist, she was studying the common diagnosis of seasonal affective disorder. Perplexingly, when she researched northern communities, even ones near the Arctic Circle, her expected findings—a rise in the number of people with depression during the long, dark winters—didn’t pan out. Needing to see it for herself, Leibowitz went to Tromsø, Norway, where, for two months of the year, the sun doesn’t rise. Its inhabitants seemed utterly unfazed: “Once, in a blizzard, I saw a man out for a run in a pair of shorts,” she reports. 

Investigating customs from places as far-flung as Reykjavik, Iceland; the Outer Hebrides off the coast of Scotland; and Tokyo, Leibowitz records the ways people have learned to slow down with the season and embrace what it has to offer. Even the most winter-averse reader will be hard-pressed not to hitch their breath at Leibowitz’s description of sinking into a steaming Japanese bath as the snow begins to fall, or of gazing into a crackling fire as the wind howls outside a traditional thatched cottage in the hinterlands of Scotland. No passport is necessary, however: Peppered with activities and tips for incorporating similar comforting winter practices into your own life, How to Winter is a cozy field guide for not just surviving, but flourishing, in the long dark.

How to Winter is a cozy field guide that will show you how to survive and flourish when days shorten and temperatures drop.
NonfictionSelf-Help

Shame on You

Review by Anna Christensen

Shame, that deep burning sensation that seems to dig all the way down to the core of who we are, is a feeling that journalist Melissa Petro is well acquainted with. In 2012, when she was teaching at a New York City elementary school, she published an op-ed in which she disclosed that she was a former sex worker. Overnight, she became the unwilling cover girl of the New York Post; the tabloid’s cruel, mocking coverage continued until she resigned months later.

It would be fair to think that Petro is uniquely qualified to speak on the subject of shame. But in Shame on You: How to Be a Woman in the Age of Mortification, Petro insists that she is not unique. Shame is a weapon of control that has been deployed to great effect against women and femmes for centuries. Equal parts self-help, memoir and social investigation, Petro’s triumphant debut methodically presents how shame has pervaded almost every aspect of our lives, and offers up ways to free ourselves from it.

Differentiating shame from other emotions, like guilt and humiliation, Petro argues that shame causes us to believe there is something fundamentally flawed in how we are. She interviews a diverse group of women, including trans women and gender nonconforming nonbinary people, to capture a feeling both universal and deeply personal: Shy, a queer Black woman, describes how the early pressure she felt to be “a good, clean, god-​fearing, heterosexual Christian” drove her to be suicidal. Ariel, a disability activist who has a facial disfigurement, shares how being pointed at in public elicits a reaction that she later feels ashamed about. Brazen, a fat woman who has experienced a lifetime of body shaming, found empowerment through sex work and “being paid to have my body worshipped, adored, cared for.”

In Shame on You, Petro invites us to get “quiet and curious” in our efforts to flush shame into the light and challenge its control over our lives.

 

In Shame on You, Melissa Petro invites us to flush shame into the light and challenge its control over our lives.
NonfictionSocial Science

The Quiet Damage

Review by Anna Christensen

One evening in 2020, I happened across a Twitter thread miles long. The original post had been yet another news item about the far-right conspiracy theory known as QAnon, and the replies were flooded with grieving users telling stories of loved ones who had all become so entrenched in the theory’s dark fever dreams that the users had finally been forced to cut contact. For people such as these, and those in journalist Jesselyn Cook’s debut, The Quiet Damage: QAnon and the Destruction of the American Family, QAnon is more than an over-the-top threat to our democracy. It is a destroyer of homes and marriages, a force that orphans and isolates.

QAnon’s most radical believers think that Donald Trump and Q, an anonymous government insider, are locked in a secret battle with “a satanic cabal” of pedophiliac global elites to liberate the country and ensure democracy. Other believers embrace some but not all of the core conspiracy theories. In total, Cook writes, they number twice the population of California.

The Quiet Damage is thoughtful and nuanced, delving into the destructive phenomenon of QAnon through the very human stories of believers and the loved ones who become collateral damage. Cook defies stereotypes, featuring a diverse group of people: a brilliant and formerly progressive lawyer in Tennessee at war with her three grown children; two once-inseparable Black sisters, the relationship irreparably sundered by one’s fascination with conspiracy theories; a young husband and father at risk of losing his family as he binges endless YouTube videos; and a 50-years-married couple facing their first real divide over the wife’s disbelief in COVID-19.

Resisting the all too common temptation to mock the believers who have fallen far enough down the proverbial rabbit hole to believe in the most extreme core conspiracies, Cook instead opts for a considered and thorough investigation into the psychology of what drives people into the arms of conspiracy theorists. The Quiet Damage employs an empathy that invites the reader to feel for both the alienated, hurt families as well as the believers. And as Cook begins to explore the delicate art of bringing the lost back to reality, she makes abundantly clear that empathy and radical compassion, not ridicule, are the most important tools at our disposal.

The Quiet Damage investigates the destructive impact of QAnon on individuals and families, exploring the delicate art of bringing those lost to conspiracy theories back to reality.
NonfictionTravelLifestylesLGBTQ+

Out in the World

Review by Anna Christensen

Summer vacation has arrived, and with it the euphoric urge to pack a bag and hit the road (or skies. Or sea). But what is a well-traveled LGBTQIA+ person (or ally!) to do when the same old vacation spots have gotten a bit too-well trodden? Let Out in the World: An LGBTQIA+ (and Friends!) Travel Guide to More Than 120 Destinations Around the World guide the way!

Card-carrying, globe-trotting gays Amy B. Scher and Mark Jason Williams have assembled an impressive guide on where to go when and what to do when you get there, whether you’re a rugged hiker, a small town sightseer or are simply looking to relax at as many vineyards as possible before returning to real life. Even better, they’ve done it with an eye especially for the queer traveler, compiling lists of LGBTQIA+ owned eateries, tour companies, shops and bed and breakfasts. (They even note which hotels are dog-friendly, in the event of a furry plus one). Divided into chapters with headings such as “Where No One Gets Hangry,” “Nature and Nurture” and “Our Favorite Small Towns With Big Pride,” Out in the World is packed with unexpected and delightful new places to explore while unabashedly being exactly who you are.

Out in the World is an LGBTQ+ travel guide packed with unexpected and delightful new places to explore while unabashedly being exactly who you are.
NonfictionMemoir

Rebel Girl

Review by Anna Christensen

Kathleen Hanna’s memoir, Rebel Girl: My Life As A Feminist Punk, is a timely refresher in resilience, the power of protest art and the tender humanity that we must not lose. Hanna, influential frontwoman of bands Bikini Kill and Le Tigre, reluctant leader of the Riot Grrrl movement of the 1990s and one of the most notable feminist artists of the past 30 years, recounts her heady and social protest-fueled life in the Seattle and Washington, D.C., music scenes. Like a comic book hero, Hanna has seemed to gather superhuman strength with every blow she receives, surviving a difficult childhood and dodging death threats during Bikini Kill’s rise to indie stardom, all while churning out ever more powerful and furious music. 

Rebel Girl unapologetically reveals the vulnerability behind that image, discussing the trauma and illness Hanna endured while being hailed as a feminist savior, assaulted by infuriated misogynists and torn down by fellow Riot Grrrls for being human. 

It’s now common to find books that document the angsty cultural soup of the ’90s, slickly packaged to inspire nostalgia for the sense of apathetic cool that’s attached to the decade. Where Rebel Girl diverges from these, and succeeds, is in Hanna’s refusal to unhook the headiness of the time from its more difficult and complicated aspects. She does not shy away from unappealing truths about the era, particularly the violence directed toward her and other women from within the overwhelmingly white and male punk scene, and the problematic aspects of the Riot Grrrl movement, with its lack of intersectionality and eventual dissolution into backbiting and purity politics. 

Hanna is equally straight-shooting when she reflects on her own failures and culpability, acknowledging them in a way that is refreshing and constructive. By illustrating how you grew, you can show others how to do the same. With Rebel Girl, Hanna intentionally busts open her feminist idol identity, liberating herself from our perceptions and serving some hard-won wisdom.

In Rebel Girl, Kathleen Hanna intentionally busts open her feminist idol identity, liberating herself from our perceptions and serving some hard-won wisdom.
NonfictionTrue Crime

Rabbit Heart

Review by Anna Christensen

Early in the shattering true crime memoir Rabbit Heart: A Mother’s Murder, A Daughter’s Story, Kristine S. Ervin pauses mid-sentence to tackle a question of grammar. Which tense does one use when discussing a relationship in which one person has died? It is a question that seems to form the crux of this stunning debut: that such a relationship does continue, though on very altered lines.

When Ervin was 8, her mother was abducted from a parking lot, her body later found in an Oklahoma oil field. Both the mechanics of the police investigation and emotional reverberations continued for the next 25 years, the brutal act lapsing into cold case territory. Lost in the background was Ervin, a confused child growing into a motherless teenager, the years bringing with them both new, terrible information about her mother’s killing and an evolving relationship with the mother Ervin might have had. Ervin achingly portrays not just the unmoored girlhood she experienced, but the lifelong processing of trauma that comes from personal and early knowledge of the violence against women lurking around every corner.

In the opening pages, Ervin dedicates the book to her 8-year-old self, and indeed, parts read as her efforts to reach backwards and mother her younger self in the absence of her murdered parent. While the facts of the crime and the unfolding of the investigation are clearly and baldly delineated, this is an emotional journey intimately revealed. Ervin is a poet, and her language here is lyrical. Her depictions of unimaginable cruelty cut so close to the bone that they feel almost tangibly interior. Rhapsodic and startling, Rabbit Heart moves inside of you and explores the places of rage and grief that are often left unmonitored, revealing both the power and danger of womanhood in a violent world.

Kristine S. Ervin’s Rabbit Heart is a shattering, rhapsodic true crime memoir that will get inside you.
NonfictionLifestylesHumor

The Good Enough Guide to Better Living

Review by Anna Christensen

When I was 18, I found myself living on my own and quickly discovered that I didn’t know how to do it. It was hunger that finally motivated me to seek help in the form of an adult figure I trusted: Martha Stewart. I gamely subscribed to her magazine, and in the intervening decades, what began as an attempt to receive simple instruction on how to cook myself a hamburger has metastasized into a person who is completely inflexible about leaving dishes in the sink, the laundry schedule and cleaning the upholstery.

This self is very stressed. She is also, in a suspicion I hold at the very edges of my consciousness, scary and unpleasant.

Upon first cracking the cover of Alison Throckmorton’s The Good Enough Guide to Better Living: Leave Your Dishes in the Sink, Serve Your Guests Leftovers, and Make the Most Out of Doing the Least at Home, it felt clear that I would simply have to take this funny little book as tongue in cheek, have a laugh and be done with it. It was best not to overexamine why the section on leaving the dishes to soak ad infinitum gave me a small muscle spasm.

Throckmorton’s great success with this book, through all the quippy humor and highly designed pages, is to hilariously reorient the home as the place where living happens. The dishes are dirty because you used them, and have remained dirty because your life is full—whether it is full of children, of friends or of Netflix is beside the point. The bedside table is cluttered with items because the bed is cozy, and having everything you need at arm’s length will allow you to stay there for as long as possible. When entertaining friends, who cares if the canapes are made with saltines if you’re having fun? Macaroni and cheese is an infinitely flexible dish; we wouldn’t eat fistfuls of carbs and shredded cheese if it wasn’t delicious.

I would not say that Throckmorton has made me a convert. But I will say that I let the dishes “soak” for two hours while I watched “The Buccaneers” under a blanket. That’s saying something.

The Good Enough Guide to Better Living cheerfully encourages us to let our houses look like people are living in them—dirty dishes and all.
NonfictionTrue Crime

The Bishop and the Butterfly

Review by Anna Christensen

A roadside discovery of the body of a beautiful, would-be starlet; an investigation into a city’s underbelly to find her killer; a cat-and-mouse game between detectives and criminals reminiscent of an early 20th-century detective noir. For many, this may call to mind the 1947 case of the Black Dahlia, a gruesome Los Angeles murder that lives on in the popular imagination. The crime at the center of Michael Wolraich’s The Bishop and the Butterfly: Murder, Politics, and the End of the Jazz Age occurred 16 years earlier, across the country amid the freewheeling glamour of 1931 New York City, and held the public just as in thrall. 

Prohibition helped to nurture corruption throughout the government of New York, with the political machine of the Democratic Party, Tammany Hall, holding crucial positions in its fist. As America was pivoting from the glitter and excess of the Jazz Age to the scarcity of the Great Depression, the organization increasingly demanded loyalty, including from one Franklin D. Roosevelt, a young, charismatic politician with aspirations to the governorship of New York. 

With a concise voice schooled by years of reporting, Wolraich describes how the Tammany Hall empire of power began to teeter when Vivian Gordon was found strangled by the side of the road in Van Cortlandt Park. As police sought to learn more about the victim, details emerged: She was a small-time starlet, she had gangster ties, she made a living by blackmailing the wealthy men who hired her for sex work—and she had been days away from delivering damning information about the police, the courts and politicians to Samuel Seabury, a former judge charged with investigating corruption in the city. So straight-laced and impervious to corruption himself that he was nicknamed “The Bishop,” Seabury posed the first legitimate threat to Tammany Hall. Gordon’s murder became the catalyst for a series of events that would change the face of New York City forever.

In this meticulously drawn account of the crusade against unscrupulous characters deeply embedded in the halls of power, The Bishop and the Butterfly shares a glimpse into a fight for decency and fairness that continues to this day.

Michael Wolraich’s true crime saga, The Bishop and the Butterfly, chronicles a judge and a sex worker who rooted out corruption in Jazz Age New York City.
NonfictionTrue Crime

The Lost Tomb

Review by Anna Christensen

In 1964, the young Douglas Preston buried a tin time capsule in a field with his best friend. Decades later, in a moment of nostalgic curiosity, Preston set out to unearth the box of buried treasure, but the remembered childhood landscape of its location was too altered to find it again. Later, Preston looked up the friend only to discover that the man had died years earlier, bludgeoned to death for unclear reasons in the boarding house where he lived. Preferring to remember his friend as the quiet, shy boy he had known, Preston made the conscious choice to step away, never finding out the exact circumstances of his friend’s murder.

That tension of the knowable and the unknowable permeates the bestselling novelist’s new collection of essays, The Lost Tomb: And Other Real-Life Stories of Bones, Burials, and Murder, all of which concern that which lies buried. Written over a span of decades for publications such as The New Yorker and Smithsonian Magazine, these essays tackle shadowy things that resist being brought to light in archaeology, in anthropology and in ourselves. Preston, who co-authors the popular Pendergast series with Lincoln Child, presents mysteries—a lost tomb in Egypt, a series of grisly murders in the Italian countryside, an elaborately booby-trapped pit rumored to contain treasure—in which the secrets seem to multiply as increasing efforts are made to expose them. He has compiled a book that haunts.

It is human nature to become preoccupied with revealing that which has been concealed. Indeed, Preston’s essays are peppered with journalists, archaeologists, detectives and ordinary people who become so consumed with the desire to expose truth that it crowds out friends, family and the regular stuff of daily life. These figures endure ridicule and persecution, yet they cheerfully surrender their entire lives to the chase. It is hard work to convince yourself that you would make a different choice, so skillfully sketched is the lure of the unknown in Preston’s collection of essays. From the safe distance of the pages of The Lost Tomb, we are allowed a delicious taste of what it is to be consumed with the desire to know, even when all evidence points to the fact that, maybe, we are better off leaving a mystery alone.

A haunting compendium of Douglas Preston’s true crime tales, The Lost Tomb delves into the shadowy uncertainty cloaking things that resist being brought to light.
NonfictionMemoirLiterature

Once Upon a Tome

Review by Anna Christensen

“Second hand books are wild books, homeless books,” wrote Virginia Woolf. “They have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack.” Perhaps this is why Sotheran’s, one of the oldest rare and antique bookstores in the world (“One year away from closing since 1761,” as the store’s running joke goes), seems like a dark forest full of adventure.

In Once Upon a Tome: The Misadventures of a Rare Bookseller, satisfyingly named book dealer Oliver Darkshire extends an invitation into the shadowy and ever so slightly dangerous realm of this London bookshop. Health and safety hazards lurk around every turn. Towers of forgotten boxes rustle without prompting. Crumbling esoteric publications must be delivered to nameless agents on train platforms. As Darkshire portrays it in his humorous and hyperbolic memoir, bookselling is as far from a tame profession as you can get, more akin to joining MI6 or the CIA, or perhaps taking up professional snake handling.

Oliver Darkshire tells the surprisingly modern story of how his book about a 262-year-old bookstore came to be.

Darkshire insists he simply stumbled into a career at Sotheran’s by responding to an advertisement after a series of failed attempts to land or hold down other jobs. His quirkiness, his adoration of history and his wide-eyed sense of wonder at the magic of books marked him as uniquely suited to the position (which largely entailed sitting behind a postage stamp-size desk by the door, as a first line of defense against customers). As Darkshire leads readers through the stacks, opening and closing various mysterious cupboards, we experience the thrill of being invited into his secret world. Peopled with taxidermied birds, a resident ghost and a band of frazzled booksellers, Sotheran’s constitutes its own small, puckish kingdom. Darkshire’s prose is so confiding in tone that the reader feels firmly included in this insular, bookish underworld.

For the devoted book hoarder and hunter, reading Once Upon a Tome is similar to the deliciously bewildering experience of wandering through a rare bookstore, not knowing what treasure might be just around the corner. Darkshire’s chapters are helpfully labeled with headings such as “Natural History” and “Modern First Editions”—but upon closer scrutiny, they are stuffed with stories that sometimes connect to the subject they are filed under only by the thinnest thread. In some books this would tangle the narrative into a volume of pure chaos, but through some kind of cheerful alchemy, it only adds to the magic of our journey through Sotheran’s. One is never in control in a bookstore; this is an indisputable fact long known by all book lovers. The sooner you surrender to the curious internal logic of this world of books, the sooner the magic begins.

In his memoir, Oliver Darkshire invites readers into one of the oldest antique bookstores in the world and acts as their hilarious, bookish guide.
NonfictionHistoryEuropean History

Anne Boleyn & Elizabeth I

Review by Anna Christensen

Mothers—for better, worse or somewhere in between—shape the people we become. Whatever lessons we learn from their example, whatever traits we inherit, go on to become shaping forces for our identities and lives. Author and historian Tracy Borman (Henry VIII, The King’s Witch) illustrates this in Anne Boleyn & Elizabeth I: The Mother and Daughter Who Forever Changed British History. Despite living in a strict patriarchal society, the love and influence of her infamous mother guided Queen Elizabeth I through her tumultuous life and much-glorified reign.

As one of England’s Chief Curators of Historic Palaces and the author of Elizabeth’s Women, Borman is well placed to explore the intertwined lives of Anne Boleyn, Henry VIII’s second wife and reformer of the English faith, and their daughter, the celebrated “Virgin Queen” Elizabeth I. This required some detective work, as both time and circumstance make the relationship seem practically nonexistent: Anne was executed when Elizabeth was only 3, and for many years after, Anne either went unmentioned in court to avoid provoking Henry VIII’s vicious temper or was slandered as a “strumpet” and seductress who had an affair with her own brother and enchanted the king with witchcraft. Even before Anne’s death, royal custom stipulated that princes and princesses were raised by nursemaids in separate households from their parents. It would be unsurprising if Anne had been an invisible figure to Elizabeth, holding little to no influence over the woman and ruler she became.

Yet Borman insists this was not so. Citing evidence from correspondence, material objects and the observations of witnesses during Anne’s brief reign as queen and Elizabeth’s long one, Borman re-creates the relationship between the two women as loving and full of significance, even after Anne’s death. Letters and receipts for purchased items reveal a mother who adored her small daughter and took their separation hard, consoling herself by ensuring Elizabeth was impeccably cared for, primarily by Boleyn relatives. Many of these caretakers would go on to become lifelong advisors and friends to Elizabeth, helping to sustain her through her uncertain adolescence and her imprisonment during her sister Mary’s years on England’s throne. From her coronation to her deathbed, Elizabeth’s time as queen was peppered with mementos of Anne: She incorporated her mother’s badge into her own insignia, packed her court with her Boleyn relations and honored those who had been allies during Anne’s lifetime and could share stories with Elizabeth about her charismatic, brilliant mother.

Anne Boleyn & Elizabeth I offers a fresh perspective on Tudor history. Set against the many volumes about Henry VIII’s rule and Elizabeth I’s influence, Borman’s book triumphantly pulls the fiery, educated Anne from the shadows and restores her to her rightful place as a reformer, patron and queenmaker.

Historian Tracy Borman triumphantly shows that Anne Boleyn’s love and influence guided her daughter, Queen Elizabeth I, through her tumultuous life and much-glorified reign.
NonfictionLiteratureBiography

The Marriage Question

Review by Anna Christensen

“Marriage is so unlike anything else,” writes George Eliot in Middlemarch. “There is something even awful in the nearness it brings.” By the time that novel was published in 1871, Eliot, born Mary Ann Evans, was 17 years into her partnership with George Lewes, himself an author and member of the mid-19th-century intelligentsia. Lewes was already married when he met Eliot but had long been estranged from his wife, who by that time had given birth to multiple children with another man. Eliot and Lewes determined to form their own sort of marriage despite being unable to marry legally; they even set off on a honeymoon to Germany. That excursion led to a lifelong union that became the complicated scandal of Eliot’s life, making her “unfit” for drawing room visits and causing her family to shun her, even as she penned wildly successful novels.

It’s impressive how King’s College London professor Clare Carlisle (Philosopher of the Heart) finds her way inside this deeply intimate partnership in The Marriage Question: George Eliot’s Double Life. Though Lewes was more exuberant and extroverted, Eliot guarded her private life closely. She had a deep desire for acceptance and love, which possibly led her to gloss over uncomfortable problems in her partnership with Lewes. On the one hand, Lewes was Eliot’s first cheerleader, encouraging her through her professional endeavors and proudly promoting her work in the literary sphere. On the other hand, Lewes could be difficult in ways that were typical for a Victorian husband. For example, the immense earnings from Eliot’s work were deposited into Lewes’ bank account, and he availed himself of them freely. He could also sometimes be controlling, according to Carlisle’s narrative, basking a little too much in Eliot’s reflected glory.

Wielding a combination of biography and thoughtful analysis of Eliot’s novels and verse, Carlisle examines what marriage has been historically and what it is today, noting that it is as sticky and complex as ever. In many ways, Eliot’s relationship was thoroughly modern: an unsanctified union with a female breadwinner who struggled to balance the demands of parenting with the time and space she needed to work. Carlisle demonstrates that Eliot’s thoughts on marriage were reflected in her work as she picked through romantic joys and frustrations, ruminating over the what-could-have-beens that haunt every long partnership.

There are no neat answers to Eliot’s marriage questions—“whether to marry, whom to marry, how to live in a marriage, whether to remain married,” as Carlisle summarizes it. Instead, The Marriage Question is a deep examination of long partnership—how it affects us, how it is negotiated—through Eliot’s deliciously thoughtful prose and reflective journal entries. Carlisle has written a book that seems to tell us a story about others but instead deeply informs us about ourselves.

Wielding a combination of biography and thoughtful analysis of George Eliot’s novels and verse, Clare Carlisle examines the sticky, complex concept of marriage.

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