PEN America has selected The Marriage Question: George Elliot’s Double Life by Clare Carlisle, professor of philosophy at King’s College London, as the winner of its 2024 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography.
The annual PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography, one of several awards PEN America bestows, is given to “a biography of exceptional literary, narrative, and artistic merit, based on scrupulous research.” The winner receives $5000.
About Carlisle’s The Marriage Question: George Elliot’s Double Life (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), the judges write:
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.
Carlisle is the first philosophy professor to receive the prize in its 17-year history.
PEN America, founded in 1922, is an organization whose mission is “to unite writers and their allies to celebrate creative expression and defend the liberties that make it possible.” More about the award, including a list of its previous winners, is here.
(via Maria Alvarez)
Wonderful! Congratulations Clare!