Uncommon Arrangements: Seven Portraits of Married Life in London Literary Circles 1910-1939

I am not sure how I became aware of this book in the first place or why I ended up buying it, but I am so glad I did. I hated for it to end and I savored every page. It's so well written that you almost feel like you know these subjects better than their spouses did - and maybe you do. In short, it's an insightful and well-researched look into the private worlds, thoughts, and marriages of some very interesting people - and also proof that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

"Some of the hand-wringing about marriage in the twenties remains eerily relevant to today's marriages." So says Katie Roiphe, the author of this most intriguing literary biography. She explores the marriages of seven of the most luminous writers and artists of the twenties -- including H.G. Wells, Katherine Mansfield and Elizabeth Von Arnim (who penned "Enchanted April".) Each vignette is centered around a moment of crisis that creates a need for a creative and unorthodox solution. Katherine Manfield develops a "child-love" with her husband, who is not able to rise to challenge of helping her through the tuberculosis that kills her at age 34. H.G. Wells "creates" his wife Jane -- even giving her a new name -- and then indulges in no-responsibility affairs with Rebecca West, among others. Ottoline Morrell gives herself over totally to nurturing rising artistes, only to be stabbed in the back by those she most befriended. And then there's Radclyffe Hall -- otherwise known as John -- who is surprisingly Victorian, despite her long-time relationship with her "wife" Una Trobridge and her lover, Evguenia Souline. As the author says: "One cannot fall into 'meagre repetitions', one cannot live automatically, one cannot simply live the way everyone else is living: one has to have the constant energy, the constant imagination, the constant refueling affection, because one is making up a life as one goes along." This book is highly recommended for everyone who is navigating a marriage and who is curious about how others handled their own, and how they confronted domesticity and long-term emotional involvement. It's particularly recommended for anyone with a literary bend; it's downright fascinating to see how those famous literary individuals from 1910 to World War II lived their lives. And, as an extra plus, it's compulsively readable and "dishy."

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.

If you've ever believed that modern relationships are more complex and unorthodox than those of the past, this magnificent book will quickly open your eyes to the truth. Katie Roiphe picks apart the tangled strands of seven couples' lives, looking for "the distilled wisdom of decades lived, of mistakes made, of love stirred by time." (p. 2) What did Katie learn? The subjects of this book spent their childhood in the repressed Victorian age. Like some who grew up in the 1950s and 60s and came to early adulthood in the Age of Aquarius, the figures in Roiphe's book lived in a new age allowing them more freedom to defy convention -- and defy they did. After a wonderfully expository opening chapter called "Marriage A La Mode," Roiphe devotes a chapter to each of her subjects. First we meet H. G. Wells and his wife Jane, whom he treated according to a Victorian ideal of fragile womanhood while carrying on a ten-year affair with Rebecca West, a thoroughly modern young writer. Roiphe explores the marriage of Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murry. Their love was, by their own admission, a "child-love" that was only passionate when they were apart. Elizabeth von Arnim and Frank Russell relied on "conflict and sparring as a prelude to reconciliation." Vanessa and Clive Bell lived in an ever-shifting menage that included her former lover, and her current lover along with his (male) lover. Ottoline Morrell, who may have inspired the character of Lady Chatterley, was outraged when her husband Philip confessed that he had two pregnant mistresses. Una Troubridge and Radclyffe Hall had been a committed lesbian couple for eighteen years when Radclyffe (known to all as "John") fell in love with a Russian emigree and established what French gossip columns called a "trio lesbienne." Vera Brittain and Gordon Catlin and their children shared their homes with Vera's lifelong friend, Winifred Holtby. The lives of these people were interwoven with family, social or sexual relationships; they were observers of and commentors on each others' dramas. The author has distilled a huge amount of primary material into this fascinating book, with no judgment or editorializing. Her notes are a treasure trove for any reader who wants to explore a wider context. Roiphe's postscript takes the position that, however self-absorbed, the subjects of this book at least showed creativity and imagination in imposing their own mythologies on the drabness of daily life. She writes (p. 302), "This is storytelling in its most challenging medium: life itself." Highly recommended. Linda Bulger, 2008

Just a great deal of fun -- Roiphe examine 7 marriages, shows what works and what doesn't, tells 7 stories, draws 7 lessons. Like "How Proust Can Change Your Life" and "Flaubert's Parrot," this is literature as gossip and story. That is, literature as life. About as much fun as you can have on a bedside table or at the beach.