Parallel Lives

by Phyllis Rose

  ‘By page five I was gasping with gratitude that this book exists and furious I hadn't read it sooner. Parallel Lives is so incisive about the subtleties of power and intimacy that it's basically addictive; I hope to be discussing it with friends for a long time.’ Jia Tolentino, author of Trick Mirror

  ‘One of my favourite critical books: a study of Victorian marriage refracted through the lives of five famous literary couples.’ Rebecca Mead, author of My Life in Middlemarch

  ‘I sometimes wonder what my life would be like if I’d found this book earlier.’ Haley Mlotek, New York Times

  ‘Filled with marvellous details and set pieces . . . Rose is consistently generous, knowledgeable and chatty.’ The New Yorker

  ‘Absolutely engrossing.’ Guardian

  Marriage affords great collective excitations: if we managed to suppress the Oedipus complex and marriage, what would be left for us to tell?

  Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes

  Contents

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  Acknowledgements

  Prologue

  JANE WELSH and THOMAS CARLYLE 1821–1866

  EFFIE GRAY and JOHN RUSKIN 1848–1854

  HARRIET TAYLOR and JOHN STUART MILL 1830–1858

  CATHERINE HOGARTH and CHARLES DICKENS 1835–1858

  GEORGE ELIOT and GEORGE HENRY LEWES 1854–1878

  JANE WELSH and THOMAS CARLYLE 1821–1866

  Postlude I: Carlyle and the Punch-and-Judy Show

  Postlude II: Carlyle and the Jamaica Rebellion

  A Chronology

  Selected Bibliography

  Index

  About the Publisher

  About the Author

  Also by Phyllis Rose

  Copyright

  Introduction

  I recently mentioned to some friends that I was writing this introduction to Parallel Lives. One, a man in his late thirties who has been with his boyfriend for seven years, but is always falling in love and talks about his relationships constantly, almost fell down in my living room, as though I had said I was going to be writing an introduction to – and therefore somehow meeting – George Eliot herself. Another friend, who claims that thoughts of her husband take up only ‘ten per cent’ of her brain, actually did a double-take: it was the only book about marriage she had ever wanted to read. It had been hiding in the bookshelves of so many of my friends, a shared favourite, without any of us knowing it. These are some of the most exciting books: the ones you feel you have stumbled upon, fortuitously, and that seem so tailored to your interests that it’s impossible to imagine them having a general, wide readership. Yet Parallel Lives, for all its singularity, does. One of the virtues of the book – and I think one reason it appeals to people of such different temperaments – is its refusal to make sweeping statements about love or life. It remains faithfully close to the factual details of the five Victorian marriages it depicts, and its mode of conclusion is not generalisation, but the epigram. A generalisation asks to be disagreed with. An epigram unfolds in all directions.

  Rereading this book at the age of forty-two, a decade into a relationship that might well be called a marriage, I cannot perceive the book I first read when I was twenty-three, engaged to a different man, who bought it for me. Back then, I was naively confident about our ability to make a happy marriage of equals, because that is what we wanted to do. I imagined he gave me Parallel Lives as if to say: pick which of these marriages you want, my dear. I am available for any of them. I read the book almost like a mail-order catalogue. But today it seems to be illustrating the opposite point: about the sad and comical fact of our natures, which defines the limits of our most intimate connections.

  Phyllis Rose began writing Parallel Lives when she was thirty-five, a mother, two years divorced. She continued to work on it for six years, while a professor at Wesleyan University. Several years after it was published, she met a man while she was living in Paris on a Rockefeller scholarship and a Guggenheim fellowship and researching a book about Josephine Baker; eventually they would marry. This is a heartening fact: that though a feminist had developed near X-ray vision for how marriages can develop in all sorts of ways – ways which can’t be predicted at the start – she saw enough value in this arrangement to try it for a second time. But more than that, I am grateful to know that it took her six years to write. We often underestimate how long it can take to make something of lasting value. Yet books that are written over many years have a certain quality that comes from the same thought having been passed over dozens, perhaps hundreds, of times. The sentences that are no good fall away. Tiny tendrils of thought in one chapter connect to tiny tendrils in another. There is a growing depth and interweaving as one proceeds on a project through many emotional states and experiences: it has to seem right not just to the woman of thirty-five, but to the woman of forty-one. It is this mixing together of one’s many developing minds that partly accounts for the great wisdom we find in such books.

  Rose’s overall project has long been dedicated to the feminist work of canon formation. She was one of the early biographers of Virginia Woolf (Woman of Letters, 1978), setting off on her project when Woolf was, at best, regarded as an important minor writer, the ‘Invalid Lady of Bloomsbury’. Rose’s biography helped establish her as a major modernist figure. After the publication of Parallel Lives in 1983 – the book received both prominent raves, and the predictable dismissals – she began writing for a large audience outside the academy, writing a weekly column for the New York Times, and publishing reviews of books by and about women. She was the sole editor of The Norton Book of Women’s Lives, selecting and introducing over 800 pages of excerpts from diaries, memoirs, and autobiographies by a wide range of women, from non-literate women whose accounts of their own lives were written down to Marguerite Duras and Maya Angelou. Having access to women writing about their lives is something many of us now take for granted, but it’s thanks to the vital work of critics and academics like Rose in the 70s and 80s that instead of just a few books by and about key historical figures, we now have a bounty.

  In conceiving of Parallel Lives, Rose was not only interested in reshaping the landscape of literary history, but the fairyland of marriage that exists in our minds, for, as she states in her introduction, ‘The plots we choose to impose on our own lives are limited and limiting. And in no area are they so banal and sterile as in this of love and marriage.’ What is it about humans that make us unable to notice or value what we are living through unless we have seen an illustration of someone else living it? In the absence of that, our experiences are opaque to us, or we feel our lives to be a failure of the narratives we suppose that others inhabit.

  How does an author find new stories, or rather, how does she detect the stories that are missing? For myself as a fiction writer, the method has lately been to train my mind on the thoughts that I find trivial or shameful. It’s the struggle to look where I feel I ought not to look that pulls up surprising stories. I think Rose’s method involved questioning the conventional biographical form: why do we study one person, instead of a couple? And from there: Why look at one couple, instead of many? And then: Shouldn’t I place as much emphasis on the less famous member of the pair? All these choices lead to new discoveries.

  Great meaning also comes from her decision to structure the book as a whole as a chronology of marriage, rather than according to historical dates, so that we are taken from the courtship of the Carlyles, to the early married life of Effie Gray and John Ruskin, through the middle years of marriage with the couples Harriet Taylor and John Stuart Mill, Catherine Hogarth and Charles Dickens, and George Eliot and George Henry Lewes, and finally back to the Carlyles where we witness what happens aft
er one spouse dies. In this way, Rose shows that marriage has a shape that transcends any individual marriage, like how a human life passes through childhood, adulthood, old age and death. That she is able to follow the trajectory of marriage through relationships that are vastly different from each other reveals to me that whether a couple fits together happily or unhappily, a couple is still in essence something that fits. That is to say, a person who is satisfied in their relationship has less in common with a happy single person than with a person who is unsatisfied in their marriage; being coupled makes one’s existence an ever-changing expression of two separate, moving parts.

  One of the most interesting aspects of Parallel Lives is how Rose foregrounds the role that imagination plays in any relationship. My grandmother once said to my uncle, speaking of marriage, Sex is the glue. Rose’s point seems to be, Imagination is the glue. She displays this perfectly in the early story of the Carlyles. Jane, courted by Thomas, who she doesn’t at first think is an appropriate mate, finally accepts him as her husband. But Rose depicts her transformation as an intellectual event, rather than an emotional one; a more grounded illustration of what falling in love might be, in protest against the bewildering non-story propagated by those who, with an air of great mystery say, You’ll know it when it happens …

  Worldly wisdom says you will know it when it happens, but worldly wisdom is often wrong. Jane, sensibly if dangerously, made behaviour a test of experience. Passionate love was the kind of love that would move her to ignore the demands of duty and expediency. Her formulation is sensible, because it is easier to describe and consequently to understand behaviour than it is to describe experience, easier to say what you did for a man than what you felt for him. Her formulation is dangerous, because, if a person can bring herself to behave in the way defined, then she can deduce the feeling that inspired it – that is, if Jane could make herself agree to marry Thomas, then she must, according to her emotional syllogism, be in love with him. Perhaps more ‘being in love’ is of this kind – deduced – than we might care to admit.

  In its way, this is a sad book: happiness in marriage seems hard to come by – consider Dickens and his wife! – but I find the book cheering: after all, it is not only my marriage that is so complex. Each relationship has its own unique character, created out of the alchemy of two distinct people, and every marriage is interesting for this reason. I find even the bad marriages in these pages have something to recommend them, even if it’s just the simple, human beauty of two people struggling.

  Although Parallel Lives has remained in print in the United States since its publication, it fell out of print in Britain, which is a shame. This is a book that friends pass on to friends, that psychiatrists recommend to their patients, and that is taught in universities. Part of its importance is due to the way it widens the categories for what we experience in love to something beyond the banal, almost consumerist good or bad – where (in an age of relatively easy separation) we are continually encouraged to ask whether we want to keep our relationship or throw it away. Rose turns marriage into something more fundamental: ‘the primary political experience in which most of us engage as adults’. It matters how we live our marriages – not only to our spouses, but to the society that surrounds us, because the only real sort of permission any of us obtain to live our lives creatively is by witnessing – in literature, or in the lives of our friends – other people doing it. This makes our own and other people’s marriages worthy of real attention. They’re important as a microcosm of how power works in our public and work lives. How our marriages make us feel, and how well they support us, affects what we are equipped to do in the broader world. It is not a trivial subject. Why should we not interrogate what love creates, as opposed to simply ‘believing’ in love, blindly wanting it, and letting ourselves be tossed about in its waves? As Rose demands, ‘who can resist the thought that love is the ideological bone thrown to women to distract their attention from the powerlessness of their lives?’ Rose turns our attention decisively away from romantic distraction.

  Ultimately however, what may be most instructive about this book, for those of us living in an age almost sick with autobiography, is seeing how Phyllis Rose uses that excellent engine of art, sublimation, to create a book that is both so particular, and so open to multiple readings. As she told me in a letter, ‘Having been a pampered, successful child, I was shocked by the realities of adult life’, yet it was not her own life she decided to write about. Parallel Lives emerged out of her desire to write about her bewilderments at living, after marrying, divorcing, and observing the marriages of her friends. Instead of composing a literal rendering of what she saw and lived, she funnelled her curiosity, thoughts and questions into an examination of five Victorian couples, producing a kaleidoscopic portrait of human relationships – a book in which contemporary men and women can find their own selves, surely as much as those in previous generations could. That the book seems to be speaking to and from many moments perhaps comes from Rose deliberately filtering a present-day understanding of the advantages and discomforts of marriage through the dance of Victorian manners.

  There is a clue in all this for those among us who find it natural and obvious – and even a requirement – to write about our own lives. Though it may often be difficult to think of doing anything else, it is perhaps sometimes worthwhile to use what we know about living, and express it through the framework of other lives – even if we end up feeling like Jane, of whom Rose says, ‘it was perhaps the hardest part of her education’ to accept that ‘even capacious spirits could submit to that ancient containment’ of marriage. But there are interesting containments besides oneself. For in submitting to the containment of biography – but keeping her capacious spirit alive – Rose transformed her personal feelings and experiences into a modern classic. Although trying to untangle one’s own thoughts by writing about distant others may seem as restrictive as an ill-fitting marriage, Rose demonstrates in these pages – through the lives she narrates, and through the success of her vision – that great creativity and individuality often grow out of the most distressing and communal fetters.

  Sheila Heti, 2020

  Acknowledgements

  My biggest debt is to the scholars, living and dead, who have made the private writings of the great Victorians available to us. I could not have considered doing a book such as this one if the biographical materials on which I base my own writing had still to be sought, found, deciphered, catalogued, indexed, footnoted and printed, or if fine biographies of the people I write about did not already exist. The publication of correspondences and collected papers and the writing of authoritative biographies depend upon the labours of so many people that I will merely touch the tip of Leviathan in naming a dozen names, but in doing so I will at least signify my gratitude to the whole enterprise of biographical scholarship. For the Carlyles: Carlyle himself; J. A. Froude; and the editors of the ongoing Duke-Edinburgh Edition of The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle, including Charles Richard Sanders, Kenneth J. Fielding, Ian Campbell, John Clubbe and Aileen Christianson. For the Ruskins: supremely, Mary Lutyens. For Dickens: John Forster; Ada Nisbet; Walter Dexter; and the editors of the Pilgrim Edition of Dickens’s letters, in progress, Madeline House, Graham Storey, Kathleen Tillotson and (again) K. J. Fielding. For Mill: Michael St John Packe; F. A. Hayek; and the editors of Mill’s collected letters, Francis E. Minetka and Dwight N. Lindley. For George Eliot: Gordon Haight, with particular warmth. In a more general way, I owe thanks to Diane Johnson for the inspiration provided by her biography of Mary Ellen Peacock, the first Mrs Meredith.

  Friends who have helped me by reading and commenting on various parts of the manuscript include Paul Alpers, Svetlana Alpers, Georges Borchardt, Catherine Gallagher, Leslie Garis, William I. Miller, Richard Ohmann, Iris Slotkin and Alex Zwerdling. Bryan Fuermann helped me with research, and Henry Abelove has left genial tracks of his learning throughout the book. Joseph W. Reed has read my manu
scripts for longer and at earlier stages than anyone else, and for that alone he deserves special thanks. Moreover, his encouragement of this project was crucial. I also want especially to thank Annie Dillard for precious gifts of time, friendship, intelligence and candour. Another friend, Nancy Nicholas, is also my editor – as excellent a friend as an editor and dazzlingly graceful at juggling the two roles.

  For many kinds of support, I am grateful to the faculty, staff, students and administration of Wesleyan University.

  I wish I wrote books faster so I could more often have the pleasure of recording in print my gratitude to Teddy Rose. This time I want to thank him particularly for teaching me – with the help of his Atari – how to overcome obstacles either by speeding up to go round them or by blasting them out of the way. Thanks, too, to Danny Dries and to David Schorr for the happiness of the past ten years.

  Prologue

  When Leslie Stephen, the Victorian man of letters, read Froude’s biography of Carlyle in the early 1880s, he was shocked – as were many people – by its portrait of the Carlyles’ marriage. He asked himself if he had treated his wife as badly as it seemed to him that Thomas Carlyle had treated Jane. With the Carlyles in his mind, Stephen, after his wife’s death, enshrined his self-exoneration in a lugubrious record of his domestic life which posterity has dubbed The Mausoleum Book, and I, reading it, conceived the idea for this book.1 Froude’s life of Carlyle is a masterpiece, but much biography shares its power to inspire comparison. Have I lived that way? Do I want to live that way? Could I make myself live that way if I wanted to? Nineteenth-century Englishmen read Plutarch’s Parallel Lives of the Greeks and Romans to learn about the perils and pitfalls of public life, but it occurred to me that there was no equivalent or even vaguely similar series of domestic portraits.