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FREE PARALLEL LIVES: VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION: FIVE VICTORIAN MARRIAGES PDF Phyllis Rose | 318 pages | 01 Jan 2001 | Random House USA Inc | 9780394725802 | English | New York, United States Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages by Phyllis Rose | Buy Now at Daunt Books This book is damn near perfection. In the prologue, Phyllis Rose has some astoundingly insightful and clear-eyed things to say about marriage. I will definitely be revisiting this piece of writing. She talks about shifting power dynamics if you are one of those people who finds talking about power dynamics in relationships "unromantic," you might not want to risk the damage this will do to your naive, oppression-enabling bub. She talks about shifting power dynamics if you are one of those people who finds talking about power dynamics in relationships "unromantic," you might not want to risk the damage this will do to your naive, oppression-enabling bubble ; about the interplay between engaging in intellectual, social, sexual, and care-taking ways; and about what does and does not seem to make for "happy" marriages. Rose brilliantly crafts, from largely firsthand sources, unfolding narratives of courtship and partnership and sometimes separationperiodically offering wry and trenchant analysis. Gossipy and smart and literarily crafted? Yes, yes, yes. These aren't just any marriages Rose is examining—they involve famous writers and thinkers, including George Eliot, Charles Dickens, John Ruskin, John Stuart Mill, and Thomas Carlyle, many of whom meaningfully interacted with one another, so you also get a bite-sized intellectual and literary history of the Victorian era. Pardon me while I go track down everything Phyllis Rose ever wrote. Parallel Lives: Vintage Books Edition: Five Victorian Marriages helps you keep track of books you want to read. Want to Read saving…. Want to Read Currently Reading Read. Other editions. Enlarge cover. Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Open Preview See a Problem? Details if other :. Thanks for telling us about the problem. Return to Book Page. Preview — Parallel Lives by Phyllis Rose. In her study of the married couple as the smallest political unit, Phyllis Rose uses as examples the marriages of five Victorian writers who wrote about their own lives with unusual candor. Lewes; Charles Dickens and Catherine Hogarth. Get A Copy. Paperbackfirst Penguinpages. Published by Parallel Lives: Vintage Books Edition: Five Victorian Marriages Penguin first published October 12th More Details Original Title. Other Editions Friend Reviews. To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up. To ask other readers questions about Parallel Livesplease sign up. Lists with This Book. Community Reviews. Showing Average rating 3. Rating details. More filters. Sort order. Oct 18, Beverly rated it it was amazing. Fascinating journey into the mostly failed marriages of famous people in the Victorian era and how the institution of marriage was and probably is much better for men than women. The best coupling in the book is between George Elliot and George Henry Lewes who were actually never married, but lived together after his marriage went sour, because his wife had 4 children with another man! The worst marriage depicted is between Charles Dickens and Catharine Hogarth. He was very cruel to his wife aft Fascinating journey into the mostly failed marriages of famous people in the Victorian era and how the institution of marriage was and probably is much better for men than women. Parallel Lives: Vintage Books Edition: Five Victorian Marriages was very cruel to his wife after 20 years of marriage and 10 children. He kicked her out of their home and never let her see her children again. He blamed her for having all those children, and also several miscarriages as though he had nothing to do with it. She had become fat and unattractive and he got himself a lovely young mistress. As the author say, her life became. His behavior towards her, accentuated by his self- righteous posturing, seems little short of murder. View all 21 comments. Update May Hi book. I am five-starring you after all, because I think about you all the time and I learned so much, and I've recommended you to everyone and thumbed through countless times to cite things. And I think my tolerance for academic-speak was raised a little bit in the last year, too, which was really the only relationship problem we had. How Parallel Lives: Vintage Books Edition: Five Victorian Marriages can change, indeed! This is such a great plan for a book. I enjoyed it immensely. The book, indeed, looks at five marriages of Victorian authors, and generally uses each example to explain a result, either of the person's work, or of their personal character. In a way, she uses the first couple as a framing device, Thomas and Jane Carlyle. Their courtship is shown at the start of the book, their last years of marriage are shown at the end, and there are a few brief scenes throughout of times that one of the Carlyles interacted in some way with the next couple. As themselves, though, I was most interested by them as a courting couple. Jane is a heck of a sass, which pretty classically covers for quite a lot of empathetic self-doubt. She felt she was talented but with nothing original to say, so ironically, she simply became known for talking, and writing letters, and generally saying quite a lot, just as herself. The fascinating thing about her Parallel Lives: Vintage Books Edition: Five Victorian Marriages with Thomas comes at the point they decide to commit to each other: during their courtship he has spent almost all of his time praising her skill and her writing and giving her suggestions and encouragement and basically wishing that she would pursue a great ambition. She too expects great things of him. And seemingly the moment they get engaged, suddenly, he sees her only as a woman, a wife to do the things he asks, and no longer is he asking for anything intellectual. It is not flattering. This is also the section where the author writes something I've found myself trying to remember since reading it: "She might reject the idea of marrying him, but she had conceived it, and it seems that no matter how impossible a thing appears, if it can be imagined, it can be enacted. I really looked forward to the John Ruskin chapter, as it of course is a deconstruction of the notorious "Actually no no no please put your clothes back on!! What a piece of work, what a piece of work. A total cuckoo clock. I think the greatest thing about what the author brings to this chapter is a depiction of Ruskin's parents, who are awful snobbish nutters, and from whom it comes as no surprise whatever to have produced a repressed nutter of a son. I am going to have to read something more about that somewhere because I feel like I need to know. The author rather brilliantly compares the Ruskins to the marriages in Middlemarch — one similarity from her perspective, one similarity from his — which was almost too great to be true. Also, like the author's last example, this marriage too came apart at the seams around gender expectation. But there is essentially a good ending, and I really enjoyed the rest of the story, of how this marriage was finished. It's so awkward, and then so happy for, uh, everyone who isn't Ruskinit's almost a romantic comedy. Also, on the side, I enjoyed how often this chapter made me look up art: mainly Effie's modeling in her future husband's painting, and the portrait of Ruskin he was working on when they met. Similarly, I'm enchanted with this book's cover art; it's perfect — first, I thought it was simply a photograph of an old house, but it is in fact a slice from a Parallel Lives: Vintage Books Edition: Five Victorian Marriages of the Carlyles at their houseby a painter of Ruskin's photo-realistic school. More outstanding wisdom from the author in Ruskin's chapter: "There is, I think, a kind of natural astonishment at the moments when one's personal life coincides with the great, public, recurring events of mankind, when one marries, for example, or produces a child. One is so amazed to have done it at all that one can by no means perceive it has been done badly. It's too bad, because it's an incredibly interesting Parallel Lives: Vintage Books Edition: Five Victorian Marriages weird situation, and I in fact liked him quite a lot. And Harriet is… something else, if not quite likable. They were sort of ridiculously idealistic intellectuals who began a basically sexless relationship while she was married, and she managed to have dominant enough a personality that her husband just kinda… let her. She seems to have been one of those people who comes in the room, merrily convinces everyone do what she wants, leaves, and everyone is left going, "uh… what just…? He saw this nontraditional partnership with someone as strong as Harriet to be exactly the right antidote to the problem of unequal marriage. He adored her so unobjectively that eventually they were a mockery, but their beliefs were fervent and clear. Because he wrote about them so straightforwardly, the author uses a lot of his own writing to lace together her ideas in this chapter. Which works, but became sort of overdone, and I felt kind of like I was reading one of those papers you write in college where you quote way too much to take up room on the page.

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