Biography booksReviewGeorge Eliot’s unwedded bliss, John Stuart Mill’s menage à trois, Charles Dickens’s adultery … a classic study of five couples is remodelled for our times
Although Parallel Lives is subtitled “Five Victorian Marriages”, of the five couples whose joint biographies make up the subject matter of the book – Jane Welsh and Thomas Carlyle, Effie Gray and John Ruskin, Harriet Taylor and John Stuart Mill, Catherine Hogarth and Charles Dickens, George Eliot (Marian Evans) and George Henry Lewes – the final pair, Phyllis Rose’s “favourite”, were in fact one of the most famous unmarried couples of the 19th century. Eliot, who in Middlemarch (1878) writes of getting married as “the beginning of the home epic”, lived for almost 25 years as “Mrs Lewes” despite the fact that Lewes’s estrangement but not divorce from his (first) wife Agnes meant they could never legally lay claim to the names they called each other.
This contradiction – the “best” marriage in a book about Victorian marriages not technically being one – is one Eliot herself would have enjoyed. That famous passage from Middlemarch, which is often read out at weddings, is, in its context, more ambivalent than it seems: the home epic is just as likely to be a story of the “irremediable loss of that complete union” as it is a “gradual conquest”, something the fictional marriages of her own characters often attest to. Parallel Lives suggests that one reason for Eliot and Lewes’s happiness is their position outside the heavily freighted marital structure, which “bears some ineradicable taint” that “converts the personal relationship between a man and a woman into a political one”. In the years that have elapsed since the book was first published in 1983, marriage has ceased to exclusively confer its dubious privileges on to heterosexual couples, and even at the time of its first publication many activists and theorists alike would have disagreed, as I do, with the idea that marriage transforms the personal into the political, rather than reflects the inseparability of the two.
Yet Parallel Lives remains a remarkably contemporary study that places the matrimonial institution itself at the heart of its scrutiny: all the more surprising, perhaps, that despite its ongoing popularity in the US and its international reputation as a half-forgotten classic, it fell out of print in Britain at the turn of the millennium. The new Daunt edition seeks to remedy that by emphasising its relevance to the 21st century. Introduced by Sheila Heti and packaged with a blurb from Jia Tolentino and a reference to Nora Ephron, this is Victorian biography remodelled for an increasingly autofictional world.
Rose, who chose an epigraph from Roland Barthes, uses discrete episodes in the lives of its subjects to illuminate the broader argument that marital relations are best understood as narratives: marriage is one of the primary stories we have historically chosen to impose on our lives. Her ambition, laid out in the prologue, is to create a “series of domestic portraits” that function as a counterpart to more familiar histories of the public lives of “great men”. Her title references Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans, which was hugely popular in the Victorian era and often known as “Parallel Lives”. Marriage, for Rose, is where individual questions about a life coalesce with the possibility of public destiny: in moments of decision, “I said yes!” being one of them, “each of us in the ordinary process of living” is, according to Rose, “a fitful novelist, and the biographer is a literary critic”.
In the 19th century, marriage was a site of trenchant structural inequality. Until the Married Woman’s Property Act of 1870, campaigned for by, among others, Elizabeth Gaskell and Eliot’s close friend Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon, a married woman legally had no right to property or to money either earned or inherited. She also had no legal claims on her children. At its heart, Rose’s biography seeks to illustrate the damage caused by such a fundamental power imbalance, and to remember acts of resistance such as Jane Carlyle’s posthumous literary revenge – after her sudden death in 1866, a guilt-ridden Thomas Carlyle wrote Reminscences, which, based on her diary, portrayed him as a neglectful and domineering patriarch – and Effie Gray’s successful legal manoeuvring out of her unconsummated, miserable marriage to Ruskin.
Although it is the life of Jane Carlyle – returned to in different chapters – that structures the book, Rose’s argument for the narrative character of matrimony is best articulated in the entangling of life and work in the marriage of Mill and Taylor. Mill, one of the most influential political economic thinkers of the century, met the already married Taylor in 1831. In love with Mill but unwilling to leave her husband and children, a “remarkably stable” triangle was initiated, and persisted until John Taylor’s death in 1849, after which Mill and Harriet could finally marry. Little of Harriet’s work was published under her own name in her lifetime, but after her death in 1858 Mill insisted that she had been as much the author of his work as he had. His claim was met with incredulity and distaste, despite the fact that his essay The Subjection of Women was inspired in large part by Taylor’s first-hand experience of the fact that women were legally obliged to have sex with their husbands – something enshrined in British law until 1991.
Parallel Lives does not seek to offer a revisionist history of Taylor’s skills but rather suggests that, if Mill was indeed being hyperbolic about her talents, this was not unrelated to the vast imbalance of power within the institution of marriage: “Mill seems at times to be apologising for the collective disadvantage of the female sex, assuming the collective guilt of the male.” What Rose finds in Mill and Taylor’s partnership is the importance of imagination. Despite the evidence of those who knew them (the Carlyles and many others disliked Harriet greatly, and disparaged her character and intellect on multiple occasions) Mill and Taylor believed themselves to be happy and liberated, because their shared image of their relationship was that of a marriage of equals. “Happy marriages seem to me those in which the two partners agree on the scenario they are enacting, even if, as was the case with Mr and Mrs Mill, their own idea of their relationship is totally at variance with the facts.” Mill’s autobiography, which has long been considered evidence of the foolishness of his love for Harriet – not least because of his insistence she was a greater poet than Shelley and the foremost political mind of their generation – is, read sympathetically, “one of the most touching love stories of the 19th century”. Rose reminds us that such fictionalisation of a partner is far from unusual: “We all make up the people we love.”
The volatile relationship between imagination and power characterises, to some extent, all the marriages in Parallel Lives. Perhaps the saddest is that of Charles and Catherine Dickens. Married in her early 20s, Catherine bore her husband 10 children in 15 years: as he became a stratospheric celebrity, she became increasingly exhausted, with most of her household duties taken over by her sister, Georgina. The rest of the story is well known: Dickens, frustrated and bored, embarked on an affair with the young actor Ellen Ternan, and publicly announced his version of the separation in his journal, Household Words. Rose bolsters Catherine’s experiences against the overwhelming tide of Dickens’s imagination: in defiance of his later insistence that his marriage had always been unhappy, she offers evidence that they had, for a time, loved each other. Parallel Lives illuminates the mechanisms by which the stories we tell – about our own lives as well as those of people long dead – are structured by our own need for narrative fulfilment, and vice versa. It might not be enough to rescue the Catherine Dickenses of the world, but it teaches us to look at who, in the official marital record, is playing the role of narrator.
Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages by Phyllis Rose is published by Daunt (RRP £10.99). To buy a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over £15.
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7tbTEoKyaqpSerq96wqikaJqfpLi0e5FpaWlnkaW%2FcHyYaKeaqpGhuaa4jKWgr52jYq%2B6ec%2BhsKWkmah6s7vSnmSrnaaesrh51qGYrWWdlrimv4yaZKCnn5l6rq3Rq6Can5U%3D