Rebecca Mead's 6 favorite books that illuminate the Victorian era

The New Yorker staff writer recommends works by Phyllis Rose, Adam Gopnik, and more

(Image credit: (Photo courtesy author))

Eminent Victorians by Lytton Strachey (Dover, $10). Published in 1918, at the tail end of the Great War, this book offers an acidulous retrospective of an era only recently departed by way of four short profiles of 19th-century worthies: an influential educator, a military hero, a cardinal, and Florence Nightingale. It was later republished under the title Five Victorians, incorporating Strachey's delicious 1921 biography of Queen Victoria herself.

Parallel Lives by Phyllis Rose (Vintage, $17). Rose examines the institution of marriage in the Victorian era by looking at the unusual marital arrangements of five literary couples, including the notoriously unwed George Eliot and George Henry Lewes. It is an exemplary work of sympathetic criticism, and when I meet someone else who loves it, I know I have found a friend.

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