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“... such stimulating American precursors as Carolyn Heilbrun’s Writing a Woman’s Life (1988) and Phyllis Rose’s Norton Anthology of Women’s Lives (1990). The writers of these books, along with the historians who contributed to The Challenge of Feminist Biography (1992), did indeed tackle dangerous issues, particularly in relation to the political ...”

“... she was dissuaded only by the advice of their friend Mazzini. Where Kaplan is content to describe, Phyllis Rose explains. In her Parallel Lives, she uses the Carlyles’ marriage as a framing device to enclose case-histories of four other Victorian marriages (or, strictly speaking, three: for better or worse, the Dickenses, Ruskins and John Stuart Mills ...”

“... sexuality.For her first, comic, blackface-derived entrance in La Revue nègre – I quote from Phyllis Rose’s 1989 biography, Jazz Cleopatra – Baker ‘looked more like an animal than a human being, a weird cross between a kangaroo, a bicyclist and a machine gun’. She transformed herself into a sexual animal for ‘La Danse sauvage’, where the ...”

“... I’m astonished​ by it,’ Phyllis Rose said in a recent interview about Parallel Lives, her study of five Victorian marriages, first published in 1983 and now reissued (Daunt, £10.99). ‘It’s miraculous that this girl knew so much.’ In her prologue about love and marriage, probably the best thing in the book, Rose’s wisdom glints like shards of glass ...”

“... Jackson told her parents. In her study of marriages between Victorian writers, Parallel Lives, Phyllis Rose suggests that love may be described as the temporary refusal to try to dominate another person. ‘Like an enzyme which blocks momentarily a normal biological process,’ she writes, ‘what we call love may inhibit the process of power ...”

“... have a serpent of delight!’ It was a rare lyric moment for James, who was a pure scientist. Phyllis had responded by quoting Virginia Woolf, although she did not know it. Not stopping her mop, she had said: ‘Something always has to be done next.’ ‘Meet me,’ croaked James, ‘at the Bureau of Birth, Death and Matrimony. Half-past nine next ...”

“... arched to meet the horizon of the sea beyond, as Odysseus’ ships hove into view. The climax was Phyllis and Demophoön (1870), a still-strange image of Phyllis emerging from the tree in which she has been imprisoned – don’t ask – and embracing her lost lover, who pivots away in alarm but can’t help turning to meet ...”

“... these animosities and the gossip on which they fed persisted for so long makes especially welcome Phyllis Grosskurth’s scholarly book, the first full biography of Klein. Melanie Reizes was born in 1882 in Vienna. Her father was a doctor; her mother was forced by straitened financial circumstances to keep a shop selling plants and (bizarrely, since they were ...”

“... The two books under review take quite different views of the achievements of their subjects. Phyllis Grosskurth’s Margaret Mead: A Life of Controversy, which appears in Penguin’s ‘Lives of Modern Women’ series, is really just another moan about the awfulness of Margaret Mead. She was impatient, bossy, over-zealous, incapable of realising when her ...”

“... deals with the ‘genealogy of morals’. The essay which gives the book its title is a review of Phyllis Rose’s Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages – a study of the pathology of Victorian sexual relationships as revealed by the marriages (or non-marriages) of George Eliot and G.H. Lewes, the Mills, the Ruskins, the Dickenses and the ...”

“... life is the stated purpose of Lyndall Gordon’s biography of her three girlhood friends, Romy, Rose and Ellie, who never became famous for anything before they each died, younger than people are supposed to these days. Of course, an early death is almost as sexy as fame and riches, especially if it’s the death of a woman who is ...”

“... to smelly puddles, the honey-coloured terraces of Bath – which Nash never saw – slowly rose to achieve a rare Palladian grandeur. The waters of Bath now mattered less and less: the ambience was all. And that ambience increasingly lured the new middle classes, who relished a resort in which respectability had begun to encroach on raffishness. Not ...”

“... with bisexual Swiss and Italians. In her Introduction the knowledgeable editor of the Memoirs, Phyllis Grosskurth, is rather ingenuous in accepting this claim at face value: not only because Symonds’s tastes were known to both his father and his wife (as Vaughan’s, incidentally, had been to his), but more importantly because of the allusions throughout ...”

“... Mathias) or that there was a ‘transformation of the British economy to an industry state’ (Phyllis Deane). The evidence he relies on comes from income-tax returns: ‘The totals for London and the Home Counties may be taken as convenient shorthand or metaphors for commercial and financial-based incomes generated by the British middle classes, while the ...”

“... compulsive make her novels come alive. This and other pronouncements are effectively quoted in Phyllis Lassner’s excellent little book in Macmillan’s ‘Women Writers’ series (1990). It is written from a feminist angle, whereas Bennett and Royle are theorists who have found in Bowen, perhaps rather surprisingly, an opportunity for what they call a ...”