Katie Roiphe’s stimulating work has made her one of the most talked about cultural critics of her generation. Now this bracing young writer delves deeply into one of the most layered of subjects: marriage. Drawn in part from the private memoirs, personal correspondence, and long-forgotten journals of the British literary community from 1910 to the Second World War, here are seven “marriages à la mode”—each rising to the challenge of intimate relations in more or less creative ways. Jane Wells, the wife of H.G., remained his rock, despite his decade-long relationship with Rebecca West (among others). Katherine Mansfield had an irresponsible, childlike romance with her husband, John Middleton Murry, that collapsed under the strain of real-life problems. Vera Brittain and George Gordon Catlin spent years in a “semidetached” marriage (he in America, she in England). Vanessa Bell maintained a complicated harmony with the painter Duncan Grant, whom she loved, and her husband, Clive. And her sister Virginia Woolf, herself no stranger to marital particularities, sustained a brilliant running commentary on the most intimate details of those around her.
Every chapter revolves around a crisis that occurred in each of these marriages—as serious as life-threatening illness or as seemingly innocuous as a slightly tipsy dinner table conversation—and how it was resolved…or not resolved. In these portraits, Roiphe brilliantly evokes what are, as she says, “the fluctuations and shifts in attraction, the mysteries of lasting affection, the endurance and changes in love, and the role of friendship in marriage.” The deeper mysteries at stake in all relationships.
This book is written in short chapters that describe the atypical marriage relationships of wealthy, well-known writers and their friends in post-Victorian England. There is a great deal of overlap in the stories about the various couples, so one person's spouse will show up as the friend, lover, or confidant in another story about a different marriage. It's all rather incestuous, and the resultant homogeneity of the milieu studied by the author paradoxically makes more mundane the seeming differences she wishes to stress.
It's well to keep in mind that the time and place under study was one characterized by very rigid social roles, especially for women; still, one wonders whether a study across cultures might not have proven more meaningful. As it is, the book seems almost the story of an extended family, rather than a review of disparate marriage arrangements.
This book is a fascinating glimpse behind the curtain of seven relationships. Not just what happened but what motivated. If you're a feminist you'll need to put that aside and read as an objective bystander. It's hard to do!
The author does a brilliant job of making the people and their stories come to life. I felt like I got to know these fascinating characters. I found it very difficult to put the book down. I appreciate that the author doesn't judge her characters - this relationship or action was 'good' and this was 'bad - but tries to understand and relate to the reader why the characters did what they did.
We are often led to believe that previous eras were more honest, true, chaste. This book shows that that just isn't true. Each generation has to find its own way in the world.
The author does a good job of quickly relating the situations of a series of interrelated couples in early twentieth-century Britain. She manages, without judgement, to consider their marital and extra-marital relationships and pose questions about how these individuals may fit into a larger context of social changes that continue now. It's well written and moves along quickly.
