Publisher's Synopsis
Phyllis Rose sets out to show that Victorian marriage was likely to have been far more varied, flexible, and even tolerant, than we "liberated" post-Freudians commonly suppose. Famous literary marriages are examined: that of John Ruskin and Effie Gray was unconsummated; those of Thomas Carlyle and Jane Welsh, and John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor, almost certainly were also; the Dickenses' marriage degenerated into melodrama; and the liaison between George Eliot and G.H. Lewes, which scandalized London society, was the happiest of the lot.;The author raises questions about the role of power and the nature of equality within marriage, the politics of sex, and the expectations of marriage, when the rules of the game were perhaps clearer than they are today. In doing so, she probes our inherited myths and assumptions to prompt a re-examination of what we expect from our marriages.
