![]() ![]() ‘Each case history is a model of brevity, wit and acumen.’ Observer ‘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 ‘These biographical portraits absorb and fascinate.’ Herald ‘An essential read… Replete with insight and wit, like Nora Ephron, you will return to this rollicking read with habitual avarice.’ Irish Times ‘A cult classic for its feminist perspective on marriage, love and intimacy.’ Idler ‘Done with great stylishness and brio… an armoury of glittering quotation, a spotlit gallery of portraits of Victorian life.’ London Review of Books ‘Parallel Lives remains a remarkably contemporary study that places the matrimonial institution itself at the heart of its scrutiny.’ Guardian ‘Rose’s work opened up new possibilities, not only for the ways in which we might conceive of wedlock… but for the ways we read and write.’ New Statesman You can almost feel her winding the telephone cord around one finger as she talks.’ Times Reading Rose is like being called up by an old friend with the latest gossip on the couple next door. ‘The only book you’ll ever need to read about marriage.’ Telegraph It is enterprising and wise to bring it to a new generation… This time I will not be parted from my copy.’ Hilary Mantel, author of The Mirror and the Light And more cogent, if that’s possible – perhaps because I have been married longer. ![]() ‘As fascinating and incisive as when I first read it. Parallel Lives is an engrossing group biography and an essential work of feminist non-fiction that continues to resonate, compelling us to reflect on how we live now. As she tracks the shifting tides of power within these parallel lives in fascinating detail, Rose shows how desire, fantasy and control play out in our most intimate relationships. In an age where divorce was scandalous and ‘until death do us part’ was taken literally, the subjects of Rose’s book were forced to find inventive and surprising ways to coexist. This is the basis for academic and writer Phyllis Rose’s cult classic Parallel Lives, a book that examines five literary Victorian partnerships, from Charles Dickens’s disastrous marriage to Catherine Hogarth to George Eliot’s joyful and unwed union with George Henry Lewes. In every relationship there are two narratives more often than not these narratives do not converge. ‘I believe that marriage, whether we see it as a psychological relationship or a political one, has determined the story of all our lives more than we have generally acknowledged.’ ![]()
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