Literary Couples and 20th-Century Life Writing

Exposing how modernist and late-modernist writers tell the stories of their intimate relationships though life writing, this book engages with the process by which these authors become subjects to a significant other, a change that subsequently becomes narrative within their works. Looking specifically at partners in a couple, Janine Utell focuses on such literary pairings as Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Valentine Ackland, Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy, and Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. Utell draws on the latest work in narrative theory and the study of intimacy and affects to shed light on the ethics of reading relationships in the modern period.

Focusing on a range of genres and media, from memoir through documentary film to comics, this book demonstrates that stories are essential for our thinking of love, desire and sexuality.