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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. This book provides a complete rethinking of its principal
figures. The novelist who emerges in these pages is a more sinuous
and passionate George Eliot than the oracular Victorian we are used
to hearing about. The significance of the friendship between Lewes,
her irrepressible partner, and the inventive Hughlings-Jackson is
outlined for the first time. And in an ironic twist, even his three
farsighted confidants could not anticipate that, late in the
twentieth century, certain of Spencer s own intuitions about the
nature and provenance of his illness would be vindicated. Those
with any interest in George Eliot, Lewes, Hughlings-Jackson, or
Spencer will be compelled to re-envision their personalities after
reading The Complicity of Friends."
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. This book provides a complete rethinking of its principal
figures. The novelist who emerges in these pages is a more sinuous
and passionate George Eliot than the oracular Victorian we are used
to hearing about. The significance of the friendship between Lewes,
her irrepressible partner, and the inventive Hughlings-Jackson is
outlined for the first time. And in an ironic twist, even his three
farsighted confidants could not anticipate that, late in the
twentieth century, certain of Spencer s own intuitions about the
nature and provenance of his illness would be vindicated. Those
with any interest in George Eliot, Lewes, Hughlings-Jackson, or
Spencer will be compelled to re-envision their personalities after
reading The Complicity of Friends."
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