Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages by Phyllis Rose

If you, like me, live for hot Victorian gossip, this is the book for you. Phyllis Rose digs into the eye-popping marital foibles of Thomas and Jane Carlyle, Effie Gray and John Ruskin, Harriet Taylor and John Stuart Mill, George Eliot and George Henry Lewes, and Charles and Catherine Dickens. It is redolent with the inimitable tang of actual books-in-stacks library research, distilled through Rose's wry, subtly opinionated sensibility.