In 1854, soon to turn 35, she eloped to live with a married man, and became a social pariah. Marian Evans, as she was known when she arrived in London from the Midlands in 1851 to help edit the liberal journal The Westminster Review, had long despaired that “the bliss of reciprocated affection” was out of reach for the homely, brooding misfit she felt she was. To those holdouts-as well as the rest of us-Eliot’s sentences say: Don’t take marriage at face value or assume you understand it.Įliot’s own marital trajectory was anomalous, and not just by the standards of her time. Who knows whether they’ll change their mind. A quarter of 40-year-olds in the United States (where the surgeon general recently issued an advisory on “our epidemic of loneliness and isolation”) have never been married-a new milestone. Americans may marvel at the romantic spectacle of lavish weddings and wonder at the endurance of an institution that has weathered so many rounds of criticism, calls for redefinition, and diagnoses of crisis.

That “awful,” though, isn’t just a way of saying dreadful it surely also means awe-inspiring, which delivers a jolt. Does it sound contemporary? The shudder at suffocation might seem familiar- I need some space.

It definitely sounds un-Victorian, framing marriage as the antithesis of a demurely conventional arrangement. Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read.

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