Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages by Phyllis Rose was first published in 1983. Charting the lives of a group of famous Victorians, the biography stood apart from other books of its kind. Rose told the story of five relationships, following Jane Welsh and Thomas Carlyle, Effie Gray and John Ruskin, Harriet Taylor and John Stuart Mill, Catherine Hogarth and Charles Dickens, and finally George Eliot and George Henry Lewes, at various points in their marriages. The accolades, achievements and artistry of these figures are well known, but what Rose chose to do, which was less common and far riskier, was to take seriously the romantic events underpinning their lives. In her prologue, Rose wrote that ‘gossip may be the beginning of moral inquiry, the low end of the platonic ladder which leads to self-understanding’, and her writing argued that romance – the crushes, companionship and heartbreaks that inform a life – is of equal, if not greater importance, than a person’s career.

Parallel Lives has remained in print in the US for the last forty years, but temporarily fell out of circulation in the UK. It was reissued in 2020 by Daunt Books and the new edition featured an introduction by Sheila Heti.

Sheila Heti:

I love Parallel Lives. I read it first in my early twenties, on the cusp of my marriage to another writer – a marriage which only lasted a few years. It’s so different to reread it now, in my mid-forties. It’s a much sadder book than I originally felt it to be. The situations we get ourselves into, the effect of the world’s expectations
on us . . .

I was hoping to ask you some questions about the book’s creation, and yourself at the time you wrote it. To start, I’m wondering about the state of literary criticism and biographical writing, especially about the Victorians, and especially about unwritten women’s lives, at the time you were conceiving this book.

Phyllis Rose:

During that first wave of seventies feminism, merely telling women’s stories was a political act, and deeply refreshing. All information about women was a gift. This was the moment of great excitement about the diaries of Anaïs Nin, for example. And then Virginia Woolf’s A Writer’s Diary – such a pitiful sample of her whole diary, but so important when it was all that we had. So few autobiographical texts by women existed that it’s hard to imagine now, when there are so many available.

Everybody (that is, every bookish little girl) had read Simone de Beauvoir’s Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter. Its very title was liberating: a daughter’s duties merited being put up to the light and examined? There was also Mary McCarthy’s Memories of a Catholic Girlhood and Anne Frank’s diary and not much more. The same was true for biography. There was so little that every biography of a woman to appear caused great excitement. R.W.B. Lewis’s biography of Edith Wharton was a landmark.

It quickly became clear that the biographies of women by men, however well done, did not hit the particular nail on the head women wanted to have hit. This had personal meaning for me because I had recently finished a biography of Virginia Woolf (published 1979) and I knew that Quentin Bell’s biography was due to be published before my own book, Woman of Letters: A Life of Virginia Woolf. I was convinced he would say all the things I had to say – how important it was that she was a woman, how important her feminism was to all of her work. But he didn’t! It was a great biography, never surpassed in many ways, but it presented Woolf as a neurasthenic problem child. She was about to become the great feminist heroine of the 1980s, but Quentin Bell did not respond to that side of her at all. It was an important lesson, because I thought his book was a model of thoroughness and dedication.

Later, books about women’s lives started coming out: Brenda Maddox’s Nora, Stacy Schiff ’s Vera, biographies of Thackeray’s daughter, Frida Kahlo, Willa Cather. I reviewed as many as I could, and you can find them in a little book Wesleyan University Press published called Writing of Women, which I gave the subtitle ‘Essays in a Renaissance’, because I thought there was a renaissance of writing about women. I also wrote about this (the flowering of women’s autobiographical writing) in the introduction to The Norton Book of Women’s Lives.

Heti:

Were there specific books that influenced your writing of Parallel Lives? Besides the Quentin Bell, any models or anti-models; books you thought were well or badly done, or that yours was a reaction to?

Rose:

Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians was crucial to my understanding of how to use biographical narratives to make a general point. However, I also felt I needed to articulate some of those points and I am naturally averse to abstraction. So I made myself study Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism to learn to get comfortable in the realm of generalizing. I couldn’t have written the preface without it! I would also mention Diane Johnson’s The True History of the First Mrs. Meredith and Other Lesser Lives (about Mary Ellen Peacock, the wife of George Meredith), which pointed out that there was always someone else in the room besides The Famous Writer, someone who felt as intensely as The Great One but whose feelings tended not to be noticed or recorded.

Diane Johnson’s work had a huge impact on my approach to biography – providing a model of biography with a feminist underpinning that was not didactic or ideological. The power is in the choice of subject, the camera angle.

As for the final structure of the book there was some arbitrariness and a certain amount of weariness, because my intention had been to write about six marriages. I had planned to include the Darwins, but I left them for last, and by the time I got to them, I just couldn’t do any more. To some extent, the research and writing of the first five marriages had been like researching and writing five individual books. I just ran out of energy. It’s a shame, in a way, because the Darwins’ marriage would have been the only ‘happy’ or conventionally successful marriage, a marriage with children and a strong family life.

Heti:

What was the reception toward the book when it first came out? Was it what you expected it to be? Did people seem to understand what you were doing?

Rose:

I expected nothing. I still don’t. I am always surprised to find that some people actually read what I write, which has made for some awkward moments.

Parallel Lives received a tremendously enthusiastic review from Anatole Broyard in the daily New York Times (‘brilliant and original’), the kind of review that makes a career, but after that the book didn’t get much media attention. A Victorian literature specialist wrote a negative review for the New York Times Book Review (nothing new in it about the Victorians, she said), and Gertrude Himmelfarb, a conservative, wrote a negative review for the New Republic which I loved because it read the book as having political heft. I had little sense that the book was having any impact until twenty-five years went by and it was still in print, still being discussed in book groups, still being assigned by therapists to their patients.

In one particularly painful moment, I got a personal letter from a professor with whom I had studied nineteenth-century British literature when I was, briefly, at Yale as a graduate student. I had sent him a copy of the book, and he wrote back asking if I really expected him to like this anti-Victorian, anti-marriage, and anti-male piece of work. I didn’t think it was anti-Victorian or anti-marriage or anti-male, and the anger it had stirred in my former professor stunned me and upset me.

As I talked about Parallel Lives to various audiences, I found it most gratifying when people came to me afterwards and confided personal equivalences. For example: ‘The president of the insurance company I work for behaved to his wife just like Dickens did’ or ‘My husband’s cousin is just like Ruskin. He was shocked by his wife’s body.’ When I read the first chapter, ‘The Carlyles’ Courtship’, at colleges and universities, male professors sometimes took the story quite personally and unkindly. None of us then knew the term ‘grooming’, but they seemed to feel I was pointing a finger.

My least favorite reaction was someone telling me they used to like Dickens, but now that they knew how he treated his wife they would never read him again. That was not at all what I wanted the book to do.

I wanted the book to expand sympathies and possibilities. But some people read it as making new demands. A French feminist friend turned on me for not living up to the ideals of my own book when I married for the second time. How could I marry an older man? she asked. He was preying on my youth! It was the oldest plot in the world. And my book had suggested we should live new plots.