In Parallel Lives, Phyllis Rose examines five famous Victorian marriages and reveals that marriage was likely to have been more flexible than we 'liberated' post-Freudians commonly suppose. Raising questions about the politics of sex and the expectations of marriage, she probes inherited myths and assumptions. Of the five marriages here, that of John Ruskin and Effie Gray was unconsummated, those of Thomas Carlyle and Jane Welsh and John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor were almost certainly chaste, the Dickenses marriage degenerated into melodrama and the liaison between George Eliot and G. H. Lewes, which scandalised London society, was the happiest of the lot.
- ISBN10 1299013724
- ISBN13 9781299013728
- Publish Date 1 January 2010 (first published 12 October 1983)
- Publish Status Active
- Out of Print 8 April 2015
- Publish Country US
- Imprint Vintage
- Format eBook
- Language English