Entry tags:
what i'm reading wednesday 19/2/2025
What I finished:
Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages by Phyllis Rose. I enjoyed this so much! This is not so much a work of biography or history as it is a reflection on relationships and on living as storytelling, which obviously is up my alley.
Rose has a perspective and isn't afraid to work from it. Her main idea is that relationships are two people telling a story (to themselves, to each other, to the world at large) about how they relate to each other. Marriage tends to be the most intense and long-lasting kind of chosen relationship, and thus these narratives can be among the most rich and complex in human lives. She chose five couples (John Ruskin and Effie Gray; Thomas Carlyle and Jane Welsh; John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor; George Eliot and G. H. Lewes; Charles Dickens and Catherine Hogarth) who have very different kinds of relationships, but who were all living at roughly the same time and all of whom have one or both members committed to literary endeavors and the life of the mind. So there were enough similarities that it worked to group these people together, but enough differences to make each worth visiting. I was more familiar with some than others, but I appreciated each chapter. I was especially intrigued by the way the Carlyles made the idea of narrativizing your relationship very literal; I imagine the idea for the whole book came from that, and that's why they are the couple who are the through-line in the book.
Like Rose, I thought the healthiest of relationships was Eliot and Lewes; Rose shows her second wave bona fides by being like, "Actually, I do not think it is a coincidence that the healthiest relationship was the one that was not a legal marriage." Maybe she's right! She's definitely one of those second wave feminists who think that marriage is an inherently unjust and inequitable institution, but she still values long-term romantic relationships between men and women, which is a suitable position for such a book.
I really appreciate a writer who starts out a book with an introduction where she's like, "My project is X and here are the beliefs about the world I bring to it. I'm going to try to be fair, but I won't even pretend not to be biased."
I feel like we don't see this kind of book a lot? It's more from a literary perspective than a historical one; Rose isn't presenting any new facts about these people, and she even has an assumption that readers will be familiar with the milieu of Victorian Britain. She's compiling facts and analysis from historians and biographers, assembling them in certain ways, and then presenting them in a way that feels much more like literary analysis than history. I enjoyed that a lot and found it refreshing; I would love to read more books along the same lines if y'all know of any.
This also got me thinking a lot about marriage and other long-lasting relationships and how successful ones are built when the people involved have compatible narratives. These narratives will inevitably change over time, but huge problems arise when those narratives diverge and they are no longer compatible. Marriages can last and be healthy over long periods of time if the narratives change together in parallel directions. This seems wise and true to me and while reading I made the decision that if I ever did enter into a romantic relationship, it would be really important to talk explicitly about those narratives, especially as they shift and change.
Also I still hate John Ruskin so much! Fight me, asshole!!!! #TeamEffieGrayForever #GetThatPreRaphaeliteDickEffie
What I'm currently reading:
Lemuria: A True Story of a Fake Place by Justin McHenry. I will have soooooo much to say about this when I finish it! For now I will say: fascinating content, TERRIBLE writing.
Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages by Phyllis Rose. I enjoyed this so much! This is not so much a work of biography or history as it is a reflection on relationships and on living as storytelling, which obviously is up my alley.
Rose has a perspective and isn't afraid to work from it. Her main idea is that relationships are two people telling a story (to themselves, to each other, to the world at large) about how they relate to each other. Marriage tends to be the most intense and long-lasting kind of chosen relationship, and thus these narratives can be among the most rich and complex in human lives. She chose five couples (John Ruskin and Effie Gray; Thomas Carlyle and Jane Welsh; John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor; George Eliot and G. H. Lewes; Charles Dickens and Catherine Hogarth) who have very different kinds of relationships, but who were all living at roughly the same time and all of whom have one or both members committed to literary endeavors and the life of the mind. So there were enough similarities that it worked to group these people together, but enough differences to make each worth visiting. I was more familiar with some than others, but I appreciated each chapter. I was especially intrigued by the way the Carlyles made the idea of narrativizing your relationship very literal; I imagine the idea for the whole book came from that, and that's why they are the couple who are the through-line in the book.
Like Rose, I thought the healthiest of relationships was Eliot and Lewes; Rose shows her second wave bona fides by being like, "Actually, I do not think it is a coincidence that the healthiest relationship was the one that was not a legal marriage." Maybe she's right! She's definitely one of those second wave feminists who think that marriage is an inherently unjust and inequitable institution, but she still values long-term romantic relationships between men and women, which is a suitable position for such a book.
I really appreciate a writer who starts out a book with an introduction where she's like, "My project is X and here are the beliefs about the world I bring to it. I'm going to try to be fair, but I won't even pretend not to be biased."
I feel like we don't see this kind of book a lot? It's more from a literary perspective than a historical one; Rose isn't presenting any new facts about these people, and she even has an assumption that readers will be familiar with the milieu of Victorian Britain. She's compiling facts and analysis from historians and biographers, assembling them in certain ways, and then presenting them in a way that feels much more like literary analysis than history. I enjoyed that a lot and found it refreshing; I would love to read more books along the same lines if y'all know of any.
This also got me thinking a lot about marriage and other long-lasting relationships and how successful ones are built when the people involved have compatible narratives. These narratives will inevitably change over time, but huge problems arise when those narratives diverge and they are no longer compatible. Marriages can last and be healthy over long periods of time if the narratives change together in parallel directions. This seems wise and true to me and while reading I made the decision that if I ever did enter into a romantic relationship, it would be really important to talk explicitly about those narratives, especially as they shift and change.
Also I still hate John Ruskin so much! Fight me, asshole!!!! #TeamEffieGrayForever #GetThatPreRaphaeliteDickEffie
What I'm currently reading:
Lemuria: A True Story of a Fake Place by Justin McHenry. I will have soooooo much to say about this when I finish it! For now I will say: fascinating content, TERRIBLE writing.