An authoritative edition of George Eliot's elegant translation of Spinoza's greatest philosophical workIn 1856, Marian Evans completed her translation of Benedict de Spinoza's Ethics while living in Berlin with the philosopher and critic George Henry Lewes. This would have become the first edition of Spinoza's controversial masterpiece in Engli "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