Phyllis Rose

Five Victorian Marriages

Parallel Lives

Traces the author's "extreme adventure" in an Upper East Side lending library where she read a randomly chosen shelf of fiction that included a range of literary styles. By the National Book Award-nominated author of A Woman of Letters. 25,000 first printing.

The Shelf: From LEQ to LES: Adventures in Extreme Reading

Examines the marriages of five Victorian couples--the Carlyles, Ruskins, Dickenses, Mills, and George Eliot and George Henry Lewes--to demonstrate the classic strengths and weaknesses of the institution of marriage

In her study of the married couple as the smallest political unit, Phyllis Rose uses as examples the marriages of five Victorian writers who wrote about their own lives with unusual candor.

Culled from the autobiographies, journals, and memoirs of some of this centuries most prominent women, this celebration of women's lives includes the work of Isak Dinesen, Maya Angelou, Joan Didion, Virginia Woolf, Annie Dillard, and others.

The Norton Book of Women's Lives

"This remarkable and wide-ranging collection, full of surprises, shouldencourage any woman who is trying to survive in a man's world, andenlighten any man who sincerely wants to understand contemporarywomen." --Alison Lurie

From the author of "Parallel Lives" comes a brilliant memoir of midlife, in which, while learning how to navigate the intricacies of Proust's novels, Rose reflects on the course of her own life.

A Memoir in Real Time

The Year of Reading Proust

In her study of the married couple as the smallest political unit, Phyllis Rose uses the marriages of five Victorian writers who wrote about their own lives with unusual candor: Charles Dickens, John Ruskin, Thomas Carlyle, John Stuart Mill, and George Eliot--née Marian Evans.

Phyllis Rose, after a career of reading from syllabuses and writing about canonical books, decided to read like an explorer. She "wanted to sample, more democratically, the actual ground of literature." Casting herself into the untracked wilderness of the New York Society Library's stacks, she chose a shelf of fiction almost at random and read her way through it. Unsure of what she would find, she was nonetheless certain "that no one in the history of the world had read exactly this series of novels." What results is a spirited experiment in "Off-Road or Extreme Reading." Rose's shelf of roughly thirty books has everything she could wish for—a remarkable variety of authors and a range of literary ambitions and styles. The early-nineteenth-century Russian classic A Hero of Our Time by Mikhail Lermontov is spine by spine with The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux. Stories of French Canadian farmers sit beside tales about aristocratic Austrians. California detective novels abut a novel from an Afrikaans writer who fascinates Rose to the extent that she ends up watching a YouTube video of his funeral. Curious about the life of writers across a broad spectrum of time and space, with a keen interest in the challenges for literary women, Rose occasionally follows her reading with personal encounters. One of her favorite discoveries is the contemporary American novelist Rhoda Lerman, in whom she believes that she has found an unrecognized Grace Paley—"another funny feminist humane earth-mother Jewish writer." But Lerman, who becomes a friend, turns out to be not "another" anything: in addition to writing she now raises prizewinning Newfoundlands and "talks of champion canines with the reverence I reserve for Alice Munro."A joyous testament to the thrill of engagement with books high and low, The Shelf leaves us with the feeling that there are treasures to be found on every library or bookstore shelf. Rose investigates her own discoveries with exuberance, candor, and wit while exploring and relishing the centripetal nature of reading in the Internet age. Measuring her finds against her own inner shelf—those texts that accompany her through life—she creates an original and generous portrait of the literary enterprise.

The author describes how Proust's novels led her to understand the art of writing an autobiography, and recounts her experiences as an author, a woman, and a person in midlife

Viewing Woolf's feminism as the core of her emotional and intellectual life, this interpretive biography reveals connections between the disturbing substance of her life and her works and illuminates her concern with the problems of identity

A Life of Virginia Woolf

Woman of Letters

Selections drawn from autobiographies, journals and memoirs to give insight into women's lives - Bernadette Devlin - Helen Keller - Margaret Mead - Sylvia Plath - Simone de Beauvoir.

The Penguin Book of Women's Lives

A fascinating biography of a revolutionary American artist ripe for rediscovery as a photographer and champion of other artists Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946) was an enormously influential artist and nurturer of artists even though his accomplishments are often overshadowed by his role as Georgia O’Keeffe’s husband. This new book from celebrated biographer Phyllis Rose reconsiders Stieglitz as a revolutionary force in the history of American art. Born in New Jersey, Stieglitz at age eighteen went to study in Germany, where his father, a wool merchant and painter, insisted he would get a proper education. After returning to America, he became one of the first American photographers to achieve international fame. By the time he was sixty, he gave up photography and devoted himself to selling and promoting art. His first gallery, 291, was the first American gallery to show works by Picasso, Rodin, Matisse, and other great European modernists. His galleries were not dealerships so much as open universities, where he introduced European modern art to Americans and nurtured an appreciation of American art among American artists.

Taking Pictures, Making Painters

Alfred Stieglitz

Essays discuss youth, motherhood, loneliness, self-awareness, memory, contemporary values, history, loss, and life's absurdity

Essays

Never Say Goodbye

Museum of Modern Art (New York, N.Y.)

Sylvia Wolf

Debra N. Mancoff

Stephanie Lipscomb

Julia Margaret Cameron

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Profiles the life and work of a nineteenth century pioneer of photography and offers a selection of her portraits of women

Phyllis Rose

Books

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