Parallel Lives the only book you’ll ever need to read about marriage – Telegraph.co.uk

Novelist Sheila Heti on how Phyllis Roses classic study of five famous Victorian couples unravels the myth of matrimony

I mentioned to some friends last year that I was writing about Parallel Lives, Phyllis Roses 1983 study of five Victorian marriages. One, a man in his 30s 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. Another, who claims that thoughts of her husband take up only 10 per cent of her brain, actually did a double-take: it was the only book about marriage she had ever wanted to read.

Parallel Lives 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 its 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 topeople 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 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 42, a decade into a relationship that might well be called a marriage, I cannot perceive the book I first read when I was 23, 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.

Rose began writing Parallel Lives when she was 35, 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 researching a book about Josephine Baker; eventually they would marry. This is a heartening fact: though a feminist had attained near X-ray vision for how marriages can develop in all sorts of ways ways that cant be predicted at the start she saw enough value in this arrangement to try it for a second time.