- Paperback: 320 pages
- Publisher: Vintage; New edition edition (16 Jun 1994)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0099308711
- ISBN-13: 978-0099308713
- Product Dimensions: 19.6 x 13 x 2.5 cm
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 554,073 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Description
Product Description
Phyllis Rose sets out to show that Victorian marriage was likely to have been far more varied, flexible, and even tolerant, than we "liberated" post-Freudians commonly suppose. Famous literary marriages are examined: that of John Ruskin and Effie Gray was unconsummated; those of Thomas Carlyle and Jane Welsh, and John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor, almost certainly were also; the Dickenses' marriage degenerated into melodrama; and the liaison between George Eliot and G.H. Lewes, which scandalized London society, was the happiest of the lot. The author raises questions about the role of power and the nature of equality within marriage, the politics of sex, and the expectations of marriage, when the rules of the game were perhaps clearer than they are today. In doing so, she probes our inherited myths and assumptions to prompt a re-examination of what we expect from our marriages.
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First Sentence
Take the case of an heiress, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and a happy disposition, who has lived some twenty years in the world with very little to distress or vex her. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
Take the case of an heiress, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and a happy disposition, who has lived some twenty years in the world with very little to distress or vex her. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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12 reviews
40 of 45 people found the following review helpful
A Relevant Exploration of Marriage
16 Aug 2002
Format:Paperback
Phyllis Rose' Parellel Lives is an exploration of marriage: what makes a marriage, how marriages operate, the power struggles within marriage, the impact of patriarchy on marriage, sexuality within marriage and many, many other issues.
Ms Rose uses Victorian marriages to discuss these issues. This is a perceptive move. Our current culture, filled with self-help manuals and marriage classes, is in some ways less tolerate of eccentricity, more assured about how a successful marriage should operate. The tensions of sexuality, power and so on have been addressed, if not by individuals, within the culture and media at large. But Victorians did not have such an outlet. Dickens didn't know he was experiencing a well-documented male mid-life crisis when he engineered he and his wife's separation. This lack of self-knowledge makes the exploration of such marriages a fascinating study in human nature.
The book is split into the marriage biographies of five couples with two sections on Jane Welsh and Thomas Carlyle. A refreshing aspect of Ms Rose's Parallel Lives is that she is exploring these marriages from a feminist viewpoint that encompasses compassion for the man as well as for the woman. Her prose style is lively as she delves into the separate personal stories of her couples and how their personal stories influenced the marriage as a whole.
The book suffers a bit at the end. Ms Rose pulls back and attempts to apply general theory to her analysis. This is mostly unsuccessful. Ms Rose's gift lies in the personal--her ability to unravel this or that particular marriage and how this or that particular marriage was influenced by the problems of patricarchy--not in a general ideological stance that would supposedly solve those problems.
Recommendation: An intelligent and perceptive read. Buy it!
22 of 25 people found the following review helpful
Warning: don't lend this book to a friend!
9 Mar 2004
Format:Paperback
I loved this book when it was first published in the 80s for all the reasons put forth by the preceeding enthusiatic reviewers. So was startled to see it had only a 3 star rating when I visited Amazon a short while ago, searching for a second-hand copy.
Why this book has been out of print for so long is totally mystifying. For, you see, I'm not alone in my love of it. - every person I've loaned it to has had nothing but praise for it.
But most telling of all, each person has liked it so much that they've passed it on to a friend of theirs, who's evidently done the same, in a never-ending chain of handovers.
Hence my search for yet another second-hand copy earlier today, But, more to the point, isn't this the best recommendation any book can genuinely have: being handed on from person to person with the exhotation : "You'll really love this book. . . you've got to read it now!"
24 of 30 people found the following review helpful
A gem!
3 Oct 2000
Format:Paperback
Wonderfully balanced and perceptive, this probing look at five unconventional Victorian marriages provides many insights into the sexual mores of that era. The section on the novelist George Eliot is especially haunting.
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