skygiants | (no subject)

When I'm reading nonfiction, there's often a fine line for me between 'you, the author, are getting yourself all up in this narrative and I wish you'd get out of the way' and 'you, the author, have a clearly presented point of view and it makes it easy and fun to fight with you about your topic; pray continue.' Happily, Phyllis Rose's Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages falls squarely in the latter category for me. She's telling me a bunch of fascinating gossip and I do often disagree with her about what it all means but we're having such a good time arguing about it!

Rose starts out her book by explaining that she's interested in the idea of 'marriage' both as a narrative construct developed by the partners within it -- "a subjectivist fiction with two points of view often deeply in conflict, sometimes fortuitously congruent" -- and a negotiation of power, vulnerable to exploitation. She also says that she wanted to find a good balance of happy and unhappy Victorian marriages as case studies to explore, but then she got so fascinated by several of the unhappy ones that things got a little out of balance .... and she is right! Her case studies are fascinating, and at least one of them (the one she clearly sees as the happiest) is not technically a marriage at all (which, of course, is part of her point.)

The couples in question are:

Thomas Carlyle and Jane Baillie Carlyle -- the framing device for the whole book, because even though this marriage is not her favorite marriage Jane Carlyle is her favorite character. Notable for the fact that Jane Carlyle wrote a secret diary through her years of marriage detailing how unhappy she was, which was given to Carlyle after her death, making him feel incredibly guilty, and then published after his death, making everyone else feel like he ought to have been feeling incredibly guilty. Rose considers the secret postmortem diary gift a brilliant stroke of Jane's in Triumphantly Taking Control Of The Narrative Of Their Marriage.

John Ruskin and Effie Gray -- like every possible Victorian drama happened to this marriage. non-consummation! parent drama! art drama! accusations that Ruskin was trying to manipulate Effie Gray into a ruinous affair so that he could divorce her! Effie Gray's family coming down secretly to sneak her away so she could launch a big divorce case instead! my favorite element of this whole story is that the third man in the Art Love Triangle, John Millais, was painting Ruskin's portrait when he and Gray fell in love instead, and Ruskin insisted on making Millais keep painting his portrait for numerous awkward sittings while the divorce proceedings played themselves out and [according to Rose] was genuinely startled that Millais was not interested in subsequently continuing their pleasant correspondence.

John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor -- this was my favorite section; I had never heard of these guys but I loved their energy. Harriet Taylor was married to John Taylor but was not enjoying the experience, began a passionate intellectual correspondence with John Stuart Mill who believed as strongly as she did in women's rights etc., they seriously considered the ethics around running off together but decided that while all three of them (Harriet Taylor, John Taylor, and John Mill) were made moderately unhappy by the current situation of "John Mill comes over three nights a week for passionate intellectual discussions with Harriet Taylor while John Taylor considerately goes Out for Several Hours", nobody was made as miserable by it as John Taylor would be if Harriet left John Taylor and therefore ethics demanded that the situation remain as it was. (Meanwhile the Carlyles, who were friends of John Mill, nicknamed Harriet 'Platonica,' which I have to admit is a very funny move if you are a bitchy 19th century intellectual and you hate the married woman your friend is having a passionate but celibate philosophical romance of the soul with.) Eventually John Taylor did die and Harriet Taylor and John Mill did get married -- platonically or otherwise is unknown but regardless they seem to have been blissfully happy. Rose thinks that Harriet Taylor was probably not as brilliant as John Mill thought and John Mill was henpecked, but happily so, because letting his wife tell him what to do soothed his patriarchal guilt. I think that Rose is a killjoy. Let a genius think his partner of the soul is also a genius if he wants to! I'm not going to tell him that he's wrong!

Charles Dickens and Catherine Dickens -- oh this was a Bad Marriage and everyone knows it. Unlike all the other women in this book, Catherine Dickens did not really command a narrative space of her own except Cast Aside Wife which -- although that's probably part of Rose's point -- makes this section IMO weaker and a bit less fun than the others.

George Eliot and George Henry Lewes -- Rose's favorite! She thinks these guys are very romantic and who can blame her, though she does want to take time to argue with people who think that George Eliot's genius relied more on George Henry Lewes kindling the flame than it did on George Eliot herself. It not being 1983 anymore, it did not occur to me that 'George Eliot was not primarily responsible for George Eliot' was an argument that needed to be made. "Maybe marriage is better when it doesn't have to actually be marriage" is clearly a point she's excited to make, given which one does wonder why she doesn't pull any Victorian long-term same-sex partnerships into her thematic examination. And the answer, probably, is 'I'm interested in specifically in the narrative of heterosexual marriage and heterosexual power dynamics and the ways they still leave an imprint on our contemporary moment,' which is fair, but if you're already exploring a thing by looking outside it .... well, anyway. I just looked up her bibliography out of curiosity to see if she ever did write about gay people and the answer is "well, she's got a book about Josephine Baker" so I may well be looking that up in future so I can have fun arguing with Rose some more!

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From:

pedanther

Jane Carlyle wrote a secret diary through her years of marriage detailing how unhappy she was, which was given to Carlyle after her death, making him feel incredibly guilty

Is it explained why she didn't tell him how unhappy she was before her death, when there was some chance of him being able to do something about it?

From:

sovay

they seriously considered the ethics around running off together but decided that while all three of them (Harriet Taylor, John Taylor, and John Mill) were made moderately unhappy by the current situation of "John Mill comes over three nights a week for passionate intellectual discussions with Harriet Taylor while John Taylor considerately goes Out for Several Hours, nobody was made as miserable by it as John Taylor would be if Harriet left John Taylor and therefore ethics demanded that the situation remain as it was.

That is an absolutely amazing example of putting one's utilitarianism where one's heart is and I am delighted they actually managed to get together.

From:

sholio

I also wondered this, but then I realized that I know a number of people IRL who would rather complain to their friends/social media about their partner than actually have a conversation with said partner about "things you are doing that makes me unhappy and how we can fix them" (considerably more of those than people who actually would have that conversation, imho).

Although composing a to-be-posthumously-delivered book of Ways You Suck is definitely next level.

From:

landofnowhere

That sounds like a fun book!

I've known the story of John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor since I was a freshman and I read On Liberty for class, and it was explained that one of the reasons that Mill was so insistent on focusing on public shaming as a threat to individual liberty was because he'd been shamed for his relationship with Taylor. (Also, coincidentially, the New Yorker ran an article on them that I read when I was home for Thanksgiving.) This is one of the things that led to my having a huge crush on Mill at the time, which in retrospect is somewhat embarrassing (but also this was in 2004 when various forms of homophobia were more socially acceptable, and it was nice to have the intellectual tools to push back).

From:

ethelmay

The only thing I recall from that book is the Muff Myth (it is not true that Ruskin didn't know about women having pubic hair). At least I am pretty sure it was from that book.

From:

kore

Jane Baillie Carlyle is my secret angry favorite.

From:

evewithanapple

The way this book - a history of a bygone era - becomes, by virtue of being 40+ years old, a relic of a bygone era in and of itself (and oh, how second wave it all is) is fascinating. Rose is clearly arguing from the position of "is marriage a prison? Is sex oppressive? Should we unshackle ourselves from the prison of heterosexual relationships?" in a way that doesn't wholly translate now (especially since, as you say, she doesn't seem to remember gay people exist) but it is very interesting to read.

And I did think her analysis of Dickens as a man who hated his wife, not just because he had a midlife crisis and decided to chase an actress half his age, but because her existence reminded him of the dents in his own self-image as A Good Person was very incisive.

From:

evewithanapple

Their whole marriage was very weird, she apparently did not want to get married at all and rebuffed him repeatedly, then changed her mind because . . . I'm not entirely sure why, but Rose speculates that it was a purely platonic relationship and they never consummated the marriage at all. Jane seems to have resented playing second fiddle to her husband's literary genius, especially as her own ambitions never amounted to much, and it seems like she hoarded grievances a fair bit even as she stayed in the role of Thomas's caretaker (doing battle with the neighbour over the neighbour's noisy roosters keeping Thomas awake, for example.) She also had a friend, Geraldine Jewsbury, who was 100% in love with Jane (Jane did not reciprocate: "[she is] always in a state of emotion! dropping hot tears on my hands, and watching me and fussing me") and Geraldine definitely did her part contributing to the public perception of the marriage as a bad one, but there seems to have been some good times too.

[edit] oh, and Jane also got upset over Geraldine's close friendship with Charlotte Cushman. If one were being ungracious, one might suggest that she wanted people devoted to her on her terms, but objected strongly to her friends and loved ones having their own emotional lives outside of her.

Edited Date: 2025-06-23 03:32 am (UTC)

From:

uskglass

Oh, I've heard of this book and I've long been interested in John Stuart Mill's life (and George Eliot's, for that matter) but I had no idea that they were connected: for some reason I assumed Parallel Lives was a study of four marriages of, like... non-famous or less-famous people, like Barbara Tuchman's chosen focus in A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century. That sounds incredibly fascinating! I've gotta pick it up; I know very little aside from biographical-blurb-level summaries of any of these relationships and this sounds like an interesting juxtaposition.

From:

mrissa

From:

littlerhymes

The Mill/Taylor situation sounds incredible... The ethics of it all!

From:

newredshoes

Okay, my undergraduate education clearly robbed me, because while we read Mill and I really enjoyed him, I had NO IDEA he had such a thriving personal life!!!

From:

raven

I am so happy for you to be discovering the incredible romance of Mill and Harriet Taylor! A friend of mine at uni absolutely adored Mill - in the sense that she was writing her doctoral thesis on On Liberty but also she was just his biggest fan - and was supervised by my pol theory tutor who was then teaching the utilitarianism papers, which is how a bunch of us went to see the play she'd written about him! About, naturally, the tragic love triangle John and Harriet and Harriet's inconvenient husband. It was great.

From:

osprey_archer

On the one hand keeping a diary about your misery that is given to the spouse who caused said misery after your death IS an amazing act of having the last word, spouse CANNOT argue with this document now that you are dead, on the other hand perhaps it would be more useful to discuss with spouse beforehand when your life might be made less miserable...? However I don't know the specifics of Jane Carlyle's situation. Perhaps part of the point of the diary is that Thomas Carlyle is simply incapable of change.

The Ruskin-Millais triangle is SUCH an experience, though. Ruskin is such a bizarre human being? His wife is divorcing him to marry Millais and Millais is painting a portrait of Ruskin and Ruskin sees nothing awkward in the whole situation? Also, incredibly awkward of him to get married and then not consummate the marriage resulting in the world's most embarrassing annulment suit. Just make like an Oxford don and stay single, my dude.

I recently read a book which took the position that Harriet Taylor was exactly as brilliant as John Stuart Mill thought, which may be the difference between 1983 and 2019. Surely someone in the interim has argued that Harriet was actually the brains of the operation and John Stuart Mill simply rode on her apron strings?

If "what do same-sex unions suggest about Victorian marriage" is something you're interested in, you might enjoy Sharon Marcus's Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England. The last chapter or two are all about this question.

From:

lirazel

'you, the author, have a clearly presented point of view and it makes it easy and fun to fight with you about your topic; pray continue.' Happily, Phyllis Rose's Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages falls squarely in the latter category for me. She's telling me a bunch of fascinating gossip and I do often disagree with her about what it all means but we're having such a good time arguing about it!

Yessssssssssssssssssssssss. That's exactly how I felt! And I really appreciated that she didn't even try to pretend like she didn't have that point of view--so many writers pretend to be objective and it's frustrating.

like every possible Victorian drama happened to this marriage

It's so true. I came into this book only really familiar with this particular marriage (having read an Effie biography some years before) and I had a great time knowing that Rose agreed with me that Ruskin was THE WORST OMG I HATE HIM.

I had never heard of these guys but I loved their energy.

SAME!

I think that Rose is a killjoy. Let a genius think his partner of the soul is also a genius if he wants to! I'm not going to tell him that he's wrong!

Agreed! My biggest disagreement with Rose!

I am super glad you enjoyed this book too!

From:

lirazel

Have you read the Kathy Chamberlain biography?

From:

lirazel

And I did think her analysis of Dickens as a man who hated his wife, not just because he had a midlife crisis and decided to chase an actress half his age, but because her existence reminded him of the dents in his own self-image as A Good Person was very incisive.

Agreed! God, I felt awful for Catherine.

From:

lirazel

Oooh, what was the Harriet Taylor book?

From:

osprey_archer

Adam Gopnik's A Thousand Small Sanities.

From:

lirazel

Oh that looks interesting! Thanks!

From:

aella_irene

Given that one of their contemporaries said "It was very good of God to let Carlyle and Mrs. Carlyle marry one another and so make only two people miserable instead of four."she may have thought he already knew.

From:

jesse_the_k

Sick burn?

From:

bloodygranuaile

I recently picked up a copy of this at a used bookstore because the friend I was at the used bookstore with handed it to me and said "I read this book back in [year] and it made me realize I had to break up with [mutual friend she was dating at the time]" and that is probably one of the few things someone could say to really pique my curiosity about a book about five heterosexual marriages. I will read it... *looks at TBR bookcase* eventually!

From:

(no subject)

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