Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages

New introduction by Sheila Heti.

It is, of course, one of life’s persistent disappointments that a great moral crisis in my life is nothing but matter for gossip in yours.

A book that Nora Ephron read every four or five years, Parallel Lives is an essential work of non-fiction about marriage, intimacy, power – and the search for more complex plots.

In Parallel Lives, the academic and writer Phyllis Rose examines five famous Victorian marriages, from Charles Dickens’ disastrous marriage to Catherine Hogarth to George Eliot’s joyful and unwed union with George Henry Lewes.

In an age where divorce was scandalous and ‘until death do us part’ was taken literally, the subjects of Rose’s book found inventive and surprising ways to co-exist together. As she describes these fascinating parallel lives in detail, Rose shows how desire, fantasy, power and control continue to play out in our most intimate relationships.