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“Clare Carlisle is obviously a very interesting philosopher, and what qualifies her as a good Eliot biographer is that she herself has translated Spinoza, and can talk about her work in expert terms. But the book is not short of emotional power; she clearly feels the impact of Eliot’s work and Eliot’s life. She does a bit of both. It’s nuanced and careful and brief. It’s really quite touching at the end. This is suitable, because George Eliot herself said that an appeal to moral sensibility through statistics and reason is not good enough. This is true; now we have behavioural economics telling us that people remember stories and they do not remember graphs, right? Eliot was saying this in the 1850s: you need to embed the idea in real talk, real actions, the real stories of a life.” Read more...
The Best Intellectual Biographies
Henry Oliver, Biographer
