Introduction

I recently mentioned to some friends that I was writing this introduction to Parallel Lives. One, a man in his late thirties who has been with his boyfriend for seven years, but is always falling in love and talks about his relationships constantly, almost fell down in my living room, as though I had said I was going to be writing an introduction to - and therefore somehow meeting - George Eliot herself. Another friend, who claims that thoughts of her husband take up only 'ten per cent' of her brain, actually did a double-take: it was the only book about marriage she had ever wanted to read. It had been hiding in the bookshelves of so many of my friends, a shared favourite, without any of us knowing it. These are some of the most exciting books: the ones you feel you have stumbled upon, fortuitously, and that seem so tailored to your interests that it's impossible to imagine them having a general, wide readership. Yet Parallel Lives, for all its singularity, does. One of the virtues of the book - and I think one reason it appeals to people of such different temperaments - is its refusal to make sweeping statements about love or life. It remains faithfully close to the factual details of the five Victorian marriages it depicts, and its mode of conclusion is not generalisation, but the epigram. A generalisation asks to be disagreed with. An epigram unfolds in all directions.

Rereading this book at the age of forty-two, a decade into a relationship that might well be called a marriage, I cannot perceive the book I first read when I was twenty-three, engaged to a different man, who bought it for me. Back then, I was naively confident about our ability to make a happy marriage of equals, because that is what we wanted to do. I imagined he gave me Parallel Lives as if to say: pick which of these marriages you want, my dear. I am available for any of them. I read the book almost like a mail-order catalogue. But today it seems to be illustrating the opposite point: about the sad and comical fact of our natures, which defines the limits of our most intimate connections.

Phyllis Rose began writing Parallel Lives when she was thirty-five, a mother, two years divorced. She continued to work on it for six years, while a professor at Wesleyan University. Several years after it was published, she met a man while she was living in Paris on a Rockefeller scholarship and a Guggenheim fellowship and researching a book about Josephine Baker; eventually they would marry. This is a heartening fact: that though a feminist had developed near X-ray vision for how marriages can develop in all sorts of ways - ways which can't be predicted at the start - she saw enough value in this arrangement to try it for a second time. But more than that, I am grateful to know that it took her six years to write. We often underestimate how long it can take to make something of lasting value. Yet books that are written over many years have a certain quality that comes from the same thought having been passed over dozens, perhaps hundreds, of times. The sentences that are no good fall away. Tiny tendrils of thought in one chapter connect to tiny tendrils in another. There is a growing depth and interweaving as one proceeds on a project through many emotional states and experiences: it has to seem right not just to the woman of thirty-five, but to the woman of forty-one. It is this mixing together of one's many developing minds that partly accounts for the great wisdom we find in such books.

Rose's overall project has long been dedicated to the feminist work of canon formation. She was one of the early biographers of Virginia Woolf (Woman of Letters, 1978), setting off on her project when Woolf was, at best, regarded as an important minor writer, the 'Invalid Lady of Bloomsbury'. Rose's biography helped establish her as a major modernist figure. After the publication of Parallel Lives in 1983 - the book received both prominent raves, and the predictable dismissals - she began writing for a large audience outside the academy, writing a weekly column for the New York Times, and publishing reviews of books by and about women. She was the sole editor of The Norton Book of Women's Lives, selecting and introducing over 800 pages of excerpts from diaries, memoirs, and autobiographies by a wide range of women, from non-literate women whose accounts of their own lives were written down to Marguerite Duras and Maya Angelou. Having access to women writing about their lives is something many of us now take for granted, but it's thanks to the vital work of critics and academics like Rose in the 70s and 80s that instead of just a few books by and about key historical figures, we now have a bounty.

In conceiving of Parallel Lives, Rose was not only interested in reshaping the landscape of literary history, but the fairyland of marriage that exists in our minds, for, as she states in her introduction, 'The plots we choose to impose on our own lives are limited and limiting. And in no area are they so banal and sterile as in this of love and marriage.' What is it about humans that make us unable to notice or value what we are living through unless we have seen an illustration of someone else living it? In the absence of that, our experiences are opaque to us, or we feel our lives to be a failure of the narratives we suppose that others inhabit.

How does an author find new stories, or rather, how does she detect the stories that are missing? For myself as a fiction writer, the method has lately been to train my mind on the thoughts that I find trivial or shameful. It's the struggle to look where I feel I ought not to look that pulls up surprising stories. I think Rose's method involved questioning the conventional biographical form: why do we study one person, instead of a couple? And from there: Why look at one couple, instead of many? And then: Shouldn't I place as much emphasis on the less famous member of the pair? All these choices lead to new discoveries.

Great meaning also comes from her decision to structure the book as a whole as a chronology of marriage, rather than according to historical dates, so that we are taken from the courtship of the Carlyles, to the early married life of Effie Gray and John Ruskin, through the middle years of marriage with the couples Harriet Taylor and John Stuart Mill, Catherine Hogarth and Charles Dickens, and George Eliot and George Henry Lewes, and finally back to the Carlyles where we witness what happens after one spouse dies. In this way, Rose shows that marriage has a shape that transcends any individual marriage, like how a human life passes through childhood, adulthood, old age and death. That she is able to follow the trajectory of marriage through relationships that are vastly different from each other reveals to me that whether a couple fits together happily or unhappily, a couple is still in essence something that fits. That is to say, a person who is satisfied in their relationship has less in common with a happy single person than with a person who is unsatisfied in their marriage; being coupled makes one's existence an ever-changing expression of two separate, moving parts.

One of the most interesting aspects of Parallel Lives is how Rose foregrounds the role that imagination plays in any relationship. My grandmother once said to my uncle, speaking of marriage, Sex is the glue. Rose's point seems to be, Imagination is the glue. She displays this perfectly in the early story of the Carlyles. Jane, courted by Thomas, who she doesn't at first think is an appropriate mate, finally accepts him as her husband. But Rose depicts her transformation as an intellectual event, rather than an emotional one; a more grounded illustration of what falling in love might be, in protest against the bewildering non-story propagated by those who, with an air of great mystery say, You'll know it when it happens .

Worldly wisdom says you will know it when it happens, but worldly wisdom is often wrong. Jane, sensibly if dangerously, made behaviour a test of experience. Passionate love was the kind of love that would move her to ignore the demands of duty and expediency. Her formulation is sensible, because it is easier to describe and consequently to understand behaviour than it is to describe experience, easier to say what you did for a man than what you felt for him. Her formulation is dangerous, because, if a person can bring herself to behave in the way defined, then she can deduce the feeling that inspired it - that is, if Jane could make herself agree to marry Thomas, then she must, according to her emotional syllogism, be in love with him. Perhaps more 'being in love' is of this kind - deduced - than we might care to admit.

In its way, this is a sad book: happiness in marriage seems hard to come by - consider Dickens and his wife! - but I find the book cheering: after all, it is not only my marriage that is so complex. Each relationship has its own unique character, created out of the alchemy of two distinct people, and every marriage is interesting for this reason. I find even the bad marriages in these pages have something to recommend them, even if it's just the simple, human beauty of two people struggling.