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SECOND MARRIAGES

Oscar Wilde famously wrote:‘Marriage is the triumph of imagination over intelligence. second marriage is the triumph of hope over experience.’

luckily, in my experience, there are as many second marriages that redress the wrongs of the first as compound them.

But there is no doubt that love second time around is full of complications.

Novels can be a guide to the pitfalls of the second marriage, though, and the best example of this is daphne du Maurier’s 1939 rebecca.

The nameless young heroine is swept up by the worldly widower Maxim de Winter, whom she meets in the south of France. He takes her off to live at Manderley, his stately home in cornwall where he lived with his first wife, the rebecca of the title.

The second Mrs de Winter feels she is a very poor substitute for rebecca and does everything she can to imitate her husband’s first wife.

What she doesn’t realise is that Max hated rebecca. The book is very astute about the shadow that a former partner casts over a marriage.

another novel that deals with the baggage remarried spouses bring to a relationship is Before she Met Me, by Julian Barnes.

Graham Hendrick is an academic who, after 15 years of a miserable marriage, finally finds happiness with ann, an actress. He is wildly in love with his new wife: ‘He envied the things she touched. He was contemptuous of the years he had spent without her. He felt frustrated at not being allowed to be her, not even for a day.’

ann loves him in return, but Graham is tormented by retrospective sexual jealousy of ann’s past loves, both onscreen and off, and his obsession threatens to ruin his new happiness.

it’s a darkly comic book but it contains a very important lesson about how important it is to look forward, not back.

The financier sir James Goldsmith said that when a man marries his mistress he creates a vacancy.

While it may feel like a victory when you stop being the other woman and become the wife, as Minty does in elizabeth Buchan’s novel The second Wife, the reality can be a lot less appealing than the fantasy.

it takes a very strong relationship to weather the guilt of turning infidelity into marriage. Buchan’s novel is a sympathetic examination of just how hard that transition can be.