George Eliot’s novels were ruthless and precise dissections of the 19th-century marriage plot, exposing, Francesca Wade writes, the “harsh disparities between societal expectations of married life and their own, often painful experiences of it.” Reviewing a new biography of the English novelist, Clare Carlisle’s The Marriage Question, Wade finds that “Eliot chose to make her life, as well as her fiction, outside the conventions of the marriage plot.” Indeed, her “radical departure from the expected scripts of a 19th-century woman’s life made her a pariah in the eyes of many, yet it also spurred her to embrace new literary possibilities.” In Eliot’s fiction, Wade notes, there was no single marriage question and no single answer to it. As Carlisle writes: Eliot saw the subject as “a site for philosophy, even a path towards knowledge”—exemplified most powerfully in her 1871 novel Middlemarch. Read “The Many Lives of George Eliot”

A Persona

The Lights is Ben Lerner’s first poetry collection in over a decade. In the interim, Lerner has become a master of autofiction, writing three well-regarded novels. As he returns now to poetry, readers are left wondering: How did Lerner the poet change as a result of his time as a novelist and also as a character in his fiction? For David Schurman Wallace, the transformation is considerable. “His active cultivation of a persona—that we can know who Ben Lerner is in the same way we know Dickinson or Rimbaud—has changed the way we read him,” Wallace writes. But “it has also changed his poetry, inviting in a more transparent, vulnerable self.” Once philosophical and abstract, now Lerner’s poetry is often autobiographical, personal, detailed and full of texture. As a poet, Wallace writes, Lerner has grown considerably: He is now “more willing to accept his position as a capital-P poet, one willing to speak publicly from his private position.” Read “Ben Lerner, Personal Poet”