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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Complicity of Friends: How George Eliot, G. H. Lewes, and John Hughlings-Jackson Encoded Herbert Spencer's Secret

Complicity of Friends: How George Eliot, G. H. Lewes, and John Hughlings-Jackson Encoded Herbert Spencer's Secret

Raitiere, Martin

Hardcover

Literary CriticismBritish History

ISBN10: 1611484189
ISBN13: 9781611484182
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
Published: Oct 12 2012
Pages: 402
Weight: 1.76
Height: 1.20 Width: 6.10 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Awards: Oregon Book Awards

One of Victorian England's most famous philosophers harbored a secret: Herbert Spencer suffered from an illness so laden with stigma that he feared its revelation would ruin him. He therefore went to extraordinary lengths to hide his malady from the public. Exceptionally, he drew two of his closest friends--the novelist George Eliot and her partner, G. H. Lewes--into his secret. Years later, he also shared it with a remarkable neurologist, John Hughlings-Jackson, better placed than anyone else in England to understand his illness. Spencer insisted that all three support him without betraying his condition to others--and two of them did so. But George Eliot, still smarting from Spencer's rejection, years earlier, of her offer of love, did not. Ingeniously, she devised a means both of nominally respecting (for their contemporaries) and of violating (for our benefit) Spencer's injunction. What she hid from her peers she reveals to us in an act of deferred, but audacious literary revenge. It's here decoded for the first time. Indeed The Complicity of Friends comprises the first disclosure of Spencer's hidden frailty but also, more importantly, of the responses it generated in the lives and works of his three notable friends.

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