[.ca] Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages (ISBN 0394725808)

a suave academic excercise in obscuratinism:
Rose's book is a suave excercise in academic obscuratism, seemingly a book about the of Victorian life it ends up an apology for itself. The story of 5 LITERARY mariages, 2 of which were unconsumated and a third which had "no smoking gun" goes at it for 318pp w/o the word homosexuality. The Ruskin-Millias-Love Object Triangle which in its Proustian driven ethos seems archtypal brings un nothing but more suavity. This a book about marriage sans sex or foresight, it's own way as conventional as the Victorians it takes for its subject. Under neath all this stuff what we see is a Professor at a Protestant University who has something to say and which we'd like to hear but are unble to...Maybe next time... or by the time she retires when it is too late...Academic life offers the leisure to think and read, and the double leisure to fear that what is said will erase the former..

Why did she write this book?:
Why did Phyllis Rose write this book? In her prologue, she states her opinion that marriage is the most creative thing we do. She says that marriages ("parallel lives")are fascinating because they "set two imaginations to work constructing narratives about experience presumed to be the same for both." Then she set out for 300+ pages in what amounts to little more than a gossipy complian-fest of "He did" - "She did". We get to hear all the wives gripes about their sexless, loveless marriages, then we get to hear about all the mens' whines about their frigid, shallow wives. Never once does Rose entertain the idea that one or more of her subjects may have been homosexual and were using marriage as the conventional way to get through their lives. Nothing does she tell us of what made these marriages so particularly and peculiarly Victorian - I know plenty of people right now in the year 2002 who have arranged their lives in much the same way as these Victorians. Reading this book, all I could think of how it reaks of 1980's feminism: self-centered, self-serving. Rose flips sides faster than a pancake when it's convenient to her argument (whatever that may be.) One minute she cries for a woman who must marry a distateful man just so she can get out of her parents' house, but she doesn't find it strange that a woman's brother stick his nose into the private business of her relationship with other men. Go figure! After finishing the book, I could only ask myself: Why was this book written???

Warning: don't lend this book to a friend!:
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!"

A gem!:
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.

A Relevant Exploration of Marriage:
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!