Description
Book SynopsisTrade Review"Carlisle has done a beautiful job editing George Eliot’s translation and providing a scholarly apparatus. . . . This is the edition that George Eliot’s translation of Spinoza’s
Ethics has long deserved, and that we have long needed."
---Steven Nadler, La Vie des Idées"This edition will be of most interest to scholars of Eliot seeking more insight into the influence of Spinoza’s thought on her literary work." * Choice *
"Readers and lovers of George Eliot owe a large debt of gratitude to Clare Carlisle and Princeton University Press for their fine new edition of Eliot’s translation of Benedict de Spinoza’s Ethics (1677)."
---Thomas Albrecht, Women's Writing"For this volume to be truly worthwhile, the significance of the translation must be revealed, and to do this, the biographical, literary, and philosophical context in which the translation came to be needs to be explored and analysed. And Carlisle succeeds splendidly in all these respects."
---Michael Della Rocca, Mind"Carlisle offers us an outstanding introductory essay in which she contextualizes the slow travel of Spinoza among English intellectuals in the early to mid-decades of the nineteenth century. . . . With her philosophical and poetic sensitivity to these two seventeenth- and nineteenth-century thinkers, Carlisle reminds us that rather than tracing direct lines of influence, today’s historical criticism might be ready to think in terms of ‘cosmic affinities’. . . . The notion of a ‘spiritual friendship’ is not what I expected to find in this new edition of a long-translated Spinoza, but Carlisle inspires and challenges us to recognize and value ‘the subtle power of a certain tie between two human beings, which is somehow sacred, a rich source of meaning.’"
---Ilana M. Blumberg, George Eliot—George Henry Lewes Studies
