What’s it like to be the wife of a literary great? Often, not so great
Marriage. What to do about it? We marry, then instantly yearn for freedom. Scholars concur that marriage is a tricky business. Too often our unions are a “betrayal of our inner richness and complexity,” Phyllis Rose declared in her iconic book, “Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages” (1983). But wait, don’t file for divorce! Rose suggests that learning about other people’s relationships can help us save our own, offering us new possibilities about how to remain married and fulfilled.
Enter Carmela Ciuraru. Her new book, “Lives of the Wives: Five Literary Marriages,” is a tour de force that extends and deepens Rose’s pioneering work. Ciuraru studies five literary couples, focusing on “how women have defined themselves through or in opposition to men.” She delves into these colorful relationships as a way to show how not to be married, highlighting the dangers of unbalanced relationships. “The problem with being a wife,” Ciuraru writes, “is being a wife.” Her book explores the negotiations and compromises that occurred inside these marriages, demonstrating how subservience and disparity undermine relationships, even love.
Even if you don’t recognize the 20th-century power couples here Marguerite Antonia Radclyffe and Lady Una Troubridge, Elsa Morante and Alberto Moravia, Elaine Dundy and Kenneth Tynan, Elizabeth Jane Howard and Kingsley Amis, Patricia Neal and Roald Dahl - Ciuraru gets you up to speed fast, flinging open their bedroom doors, describing their lives in astonishing detail. She provides menus, favorite drinks (champagne floating in a bathtub full of ice cubes), guest lists (Cary Grant, Philip Larkin, Marianne Moore) and wardrobes (Dundy’s Schiaparelli dress, Hall’s “black-and-white pinstripe coat”). She explores their motivations and psychology, capturing their tumultuous experiences from the inside out, as though she knew them personally (she did meet one of them, Patricia Neal).
Suspense builds as we learn how each couple met and why they were attracted to each other (or not, in the case of Morante and Moravia). Friends and relatives weigh in. Leonard Bernstein whispers to Neal that marrying Dahl will be “the biggest mistake of your life.” Tracy Tynan said watching her parents fight was like “watching a horror movie, scary but riveting.” We hear about addictions, money and sexual proclivities, including Ken Tynan’s obsession with spanking women. Ciuraru diligently records the sources of even the most eye-popping details - journals, diaries, letters, biographies and memoirs - and assesses them for accuracy, at the same time that she keeps the story moving briskly along.
With the exception of Morante, the wives in these stories sacrificed themselves on the altar of their partners. When Neal started making more money than Dahl, he threatened to leave her. Instead of saying good riddance (which this reader was begging her to do), she appeased him, giving him complete control of her money and doing all the cooking and cleaning.