While writing the book I was thinking a lot — with Eliot's help — about the connections between philosophy and art and life, and I'm thrilled that those ideas resonated with the PEN judges.
Professor Clare Carlisle, Department of Philosophy
29 November 2024
Professor Clare Carlisle wins PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography
The award celebrates the excellence of Carlisle’s biography of George Eliot.
The PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography has been awarded to Professor Clare Carlisle, Professor of Philosophy for the biography, The Marriage Question: George Eliot’s Double Life. The book explores how George Eliot wrestled with the philosophy and question of marriage, in art and life. The winning title is considered by the judges to be a work of exceptional literary, narrative, and artistic merit, based on scrupulous research.
The judges, David Blight, Ann McCutchan and James Traub on Professor Carlisle's book; “George Eliot was a far-reaching essayist and public philosopher before she became one of the greatest of all English novelists. In The Marriage Question, Clare Carlisle achieves a comparable amplitude, for her book about Eliot is equal parts biography, literary criticism, philosophy and intellectual history. Her great theme is Eliot’s astonishing gift for transmuting profound ideas—about the nature of human relationships, marriage above all—into characters and stories that feel thrillingly alive. Carlisle writes with great delicacy and insight both about Eliot’s relationship with her life partner, George Lewes, and about the movement of thought and feeling in the great novels and stories. “It is the fraught negotiation between self and world that shapes our lives,” she writes of Mill On The Floss, capturing both the terrible drama of the novel’s heroine, Maggie Tulliver, and the Romantic vision of human possibility that inspired Eliot, Lewes and the great thinkers of their day.”
This prize of $5,000 goes to the author of a distinguished work published in the United States during the previous calendar year.
The 2024 Finalists:
The Marriage Question: George Eliot’s Double Life, Clare Carlisle (Farrar Straus, and Giroux)
King: A Life, Jonathan Eig (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux)
Madonna: A Rebel Life, Mary Gabriel (LIttle, Brown)
Guardians of the Valley: John Muir and the Friendship That Saved Yosemite, Dean King (Scribner)
Cosmic Scholar: The Life and Times of Harry Smith, John Szwed (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux)
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Professor of Philosophy