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Phyllis Rose: ‘Power still resides in marriage’ | Biography books | The Guardian

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P hyllis Rose is an American author and former academic whose books include Woman of Letters: A Life of Virginia Woolf and The Year of Reading Proust. She is best known for Parallel Lives, her acclaimed study of Victorian marriage as seen through the relationships of five literary couples including Effie Gray and John Ruskin, and Catherine Hogarth and Charles Dickens. The book is being reissued in a new edition with an introduction by Sheila Heti. Parallel Lives first came out in 1983. What’s your relationship with it now? I’m astonished by it. I’m very proud of the girl who wrote it. It’s miraculous that this girl knew so much, and was able to write so wittily. Does that girl strike you as having been unnervingly wise? “Unnerving” is a good word for it. I can’t tell you where that wisdom came from, except that the magic of biographical writing is that you get out of yourself: you’re up in the clouds, looking down on people. You get a distance that isn’t available to you in terms of lo

‘Victorians were very different to us... They weren’t self-conscious about expressing themselves’: Phyllis Rose in New York. Photograph: Mike McGregor/The Observer View image in fullscreen ‘Victorians were very different to us... They weren’t self-conscious about expressing themselves’: Phyllis Rose in New York. Photograph: Mike McGregor/The Observer Books interview Biography books This article is more than 6 years old Interview Phyllis Rose: ‘Power still resides in marriage’ This article is more than 6 years old Rachel Cooke The US author on her reissued classic about Victorian literary coupl

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