Marriage Guidance

I first came across Phyllis Rose’s Parallel Lives (1983) a decade after it was published, thanks to a mention in a footnote of a now-forgotten book. I liked the sound of a study of five Victorian marriages and promptly ordered a copy. I have that (paperback) copy still, though later I ordered another (hardback), on the principle that when you find something really good – a perfect pair of jeans for example – it’s often worth buying two.

On first reading I was much struck, as I still am, by Rose’s wisdom and wit. Here was a writer of vast intelligence, who wore her learning lightly and who expressed herself with enviable crispness and clarity. So many good lines! So much good sense! I found myself jotting down quotes, as an aide-mémoire. This, for example: ‘One’s relationship to a person known over years is unlikely to be “happier” than one’s relationship with a stranger (hence the perpetual appeal of strangers), but it is qualitatively richer, deeper . . . meaning develops simply because of time and intimacy.’ Or, ‘Gossip may be the beginning of moral inquiry.’ I was very taken by this: the idea that gossip, far from being merely an enjoyable indulgence, can have a serious moral purpose, as an examination and evaluation of human behaviour. (Elsewhere Rose has suggested that women’s fondness for gossip points to their ‘finer sensibilities’, while men tend to be a ‘little mor ally dull’, though I can think of a number of enthusiastic male gossipers.) There is, of course, no better fodder for gossip than other people’s marriages. The five marriages that come under Rose’s scrutiny are those of Jane Welsh and Thomas Carlyle, Effie Gray and John Ruskin, Harriet Taylor and John Stuart Mill, Catherine Hogarth and Charles Dickens, and George Eliot and George Henry Lewes (it’s no accident that they are all literary marriages – Rose favours writers as they ‘tend to report’ on their own lives). Of these marriages two (the Ruskins and the Mills), if not three (the Carlyles) were sexless, which Rose prefers to see as a matter ‘of flexibility rather than abnormality’. In fact you come away from reading Parallel Lives feeling that the Victorians were rather more flexible in their personal relations than we are today. The stories of some of these couples may be familiar, but in Rose’s hands they become fresh and full of insight. She’s equally perceptive on the subject of marriage in general. In fact anyone in need of some marriage guidance could do a lot worse than read her prologue. Her stance is (broadly) feminist and (broadly) political, with a nod to psychoanalysis, but there is no drum-beating here. She’s interested in the balance of power within relationships and how marriages go awry, ‘not when love fades’ but when the ‘understanding about the balance of power breaks down, when the weaker member feels exploited or the stronger feels unrewarded for his or her strength’. But Rose is also interested in the power of the narrative, or more precisely ‘the way in which every marriage is a narrative construct – or two narrative constructs’. In unhappy marriages she sees ‘two versions of reality rather than two people in conflict’; whereas happy marriages are ‘those in which the two partners agree on the scenario they are enacting’, regardless of whether that scenario squares with the facts. Marriage, with all its rich narrative possibilities, is the subject of the nineteenth-century novel and it has lost none of its appeal today. Of course things have moved on, maritally speaking, since Parallel Lives was first published, but most of what Rose has to say about heterosexual marriage applies equally to same-sex partnerships. And in some ways the Victorian experience of marriage was not so very different from our own.

One hardly knows whether the Victorians suffered more from their lack of recourse to easy divorce or from the disappearance of the brisk assumptions of arranged marriages. At least when marriages were frankly arrangements of property, no one expected them to float on an unceasing love-tide, whereas we and the Victorians have been in the same boat on that romantic flood.

The quickie divorce may be a mixed blessing anyway: ‘Bad enough to choose once in a lifetime whom to live with; to go on choosing, to reaffirm one’s choice day after day, as one must when it is culturally possible to divorce, is really asking a lot of people.’ John Stuart Mill was in favour of divorce but did not believe it an effective remedy ‘for certain kinds of marital distress, those caused by the human tendency to grow unhappy in the course of years and to blame this unhappiness on one’s spouse’. Which is why a change of spouse is not always the answer. Rose constructs her book around the trajectory of a marriage, with different couples illustrating its different phases. She begins with the largely epistolary courtship of the Carlyles, when Carlyle set out to educate Jane. (He recommended four hours of study a day: Jane, ‘who preferred the heroic cavalry charge to successful trench warfare’, replied that four were not enough, she would do eight. They settled on six.) Moving on we get the Ruskins on their honeymoon, when Ruskin was reputedly so appalled at the sight of Effie’s pubic hair that the marriage remained unconsummated (the Ruskin marriage also stands as a warning of the perils of perpetually hovering in-laws). Later comes Dickens’s midlife crisis, to which the baffled, blameless Catherine fell victim. Unknown to me was the story of Harriet Taylor and John Stuart Mill. If ever you want an example of how some men willingly subjugate themselves to the will of a powerful woman and how some women find ‘deep satisfaction in being the apex between two men’, then look no further than Harriet Taylor. While married to the exemplary – good-natured, generous, accommodating – Mr Taylor, Harriet openly conducted a close, but chaste, relationship with Mill, with whom she found the intellectual companionship that her husband couldn’t offer. When Mr Taylor obligingly died, Harriet was free to marry Mill, but she still insisted on a mariage blanc, no doubt aware that Mill would be the last man to claim his conjugal rights. For Mill, the rather ordinary Harriet was a paragon, a genius, a pro found thinker, and he was entirely happy to be ruled by her. ‘Of course he made her up, as we all make up the people we love.’ Rose makes no bones about having a particular soft spot for the two Georges (Eliot and Lewes), who are the nearest thing here to a happily married couple, though the fact that they were not actually married (Lewes being unable to divorce his wife, who had several children by her lover, Lewes’s friend Thornton Leigh Hunt) may have had something to do with that. ‘How much did their happiness depend upon the irregularity of their union?’ speculates Rose. ‘Treated as sinful lovers, they remained lovers . . . Asking for little, they secured for themselves a joint life of exceptional richness’ – a life of work and talk and reading aloud and providing a home for Lewes’s sons and receiving such visitors as were prepared to overlook their unmarried state. The Eliot–Lewes ménage was much discussed (by the Carlyles for one) and subject to general, though not universal, disapproval: ‘It is of course one of life’s persistent disappointments that a great crisis in my life is nothing but a matter of gossip in yours.’ For Eliot, nothing was more serious, or more deeply felt, than her commitment to Lewes. Framing the whole are the Carlyles. The Carlyle marriage functioned well enough while Carlyle battled Frederick the Great and Jane crowing cockerels and bed bugs, but once Carlyle became bedazzled by a society hostess – Lady Harriet Ashburton – Jane no longer felt indispensable, and unhappiness set in. Rose ends her book with Carlyle’s great remorse after Jane’s death, when he tried to make amends for his neglect by putting together her letters and diaries (she the more brilliant and far more readable prose stylist) for publication (see SF no.84). ‘To say that they clashed in many ways and in many ways disappointed each other is to say no more than that they were married, and for a long time,’ says Rose, ever wise. But the Carlyles also act as witnesses to and commentators on their fellow couples, as their lives intersect in satisfying ways. So we hear the story of the manuscript of volume one of Carlyle’s history of the French Revolution, which he sent to his friend John Stuart Mill for comment. Mill’s maid, mistaking it for rubbish, popped it on the f ire. Five months of work gone up in smoke. The Carlyles chose to blame Harriet, whom they didn’t think much of (Carlyle named her ‘Platonica’). Another of the pleasures of Parallel Lives is to send you back to the writing of its subjects – Jane Carlyle’s letters for example, or Mill’s The Subjection of Women – but principally you can just enjoy keeping company with Phyllis Rose and her enquiring mind. Back in the 1990s I knew little of Rose, other than that she was an American writer and professor, but I imagined her living in New York’s Upper West Side and leading a cultivated, intellectual, New York Review of Books kind of life. Not so far from the truth in fact, as I learned when I Googled her. She’s now in her eighties, living in New York and Key West, and married (second time round) to a Frenchman, the writer and illustrator of the Babar books, a fact that I find pleasing.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 87 © Kate Hubbard 2025