Even before I opened Lives of the Wives: Five Literary Marriages, by Carmela Ciuraru, I had grave doubts about the viability of connubial life. I speak from limited experience, having been married once for four years and very quickly finding myself in agreement with the writer Stella Gibbons’s sentiment that marriage is one “long monotony.” There are couples who flourish within its confines, although I myself know many more who are resigned or who live with each other in a state of barely suppressed hostility. The fact that more than half of marriages end in divorce clearly points to a crack in its very foundation.
Ciuraru dissects a group of five 20th-century couples: Una Troubridge and Radclyffe Hall (both gay, they never married); Elsa Morante and Alberto Moravia; Elaine Dundy and Kenneth Tynan; Elizabeth Jane Howard and Kingsley Amis; and Patricia Neal and Roald Dahl. If marriages between ordinary mortals can be expected to face difficulties, the chances of things going awry multiply exponentially—mostly for the wives—when it comes to unions between writers. “In the marriages of celebrated literati throughout history, husband is to fame as wife is to footnote,” Ciuraru writes with axiomatic firmness.
