Lives of the Wives
Five Literary Marriages
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
A New York Times Notable Book of the Year
A Washington Post Best Nonfiction of the Year
One of PEOPLE's Top 10 Books of the Year
"Delicious and infuriating...unputdownable." —Sadie Stein, New York Times
"A compulsively readable book." —Wall Street Journal
In Lives of the Wives, author Carmela Ciuraru offers a witty, provocative look inside the tumultuous marriages of five famous writers, illuminating the creative process as well as the role of money, fame, and power in these complex and fascinating relationships.
The legendary British theater critic Kenneth Tynan encouraged his American wife, Elaine Dundy, to write, then watched in a jealous rage as she became a bestselling author. In their early years of marriage, Roald Dahl enjoyed basking in the glow of his glamorous movie star wife, Patricia Neal, until he detested her for being wealthier and more famous. Elizabeth Jane Howard had to divorce Kingsley Amis to escape his suffocating needs and pursue her own writing. In the marriage of the Italian novelists Elsa Morante and Alberto Moravia, it was Morante who often behaved abusively toward her cool, detached husband, even as he unwaveringly championed his wife’s talent and work. The most conventional partnership is a lesbian couple, Una Troubridge and Radclyffe Hall, both of whom were socially and politically conservative and unapologetic snobs.
Lives of the Wives is an erudite, entertaining project of reclamation and reparation, paying tribute to the wives who were often demonized and misrepresented, and revealing the price they paid for recognition and freedom.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Critic Ciuraru (Nom de Plume: A (Secret) History of Pseudonyms) delivers a harrowing history of five mid-20th-century literary spouses. "If we think of literary wifedom as a narrative genre," Ciuraru writes, "it might be described as some blend of romance—turbulent, passionate, highly charged—and dystopian literature." There's Una Troubridge, whose marriage to Radclyffe Hall was marked by the former inhabiting "a subservient role with no trace of resentment or seething envy." (Indeed, with Troubridge the "submissive wife" and Hall the "controlling husband, they did not exactly defy patriarchal norms," Ciuraru notes.) Elsa Morante, meanwhile, was often "volatile" and made to feel "ignored, unwanted, taken for granted" by her husband Alberto Moravia; Kenneth Tynan sexually abused his second wife, Elaine Dundy, a writer whose "life was filled with fascinating characters, remarkable friendships, adventure, glamour, and literary success"; and while Elizabeth Jane Howard "always marveled" at husband Kingsley Amis's "intense discipline in his work," it often came at the expense of her own. Throughout, there are intense accounts of the writers psychologically (and sometimes physically) brutalizing their long-suffering partners; as Ciuraru puts it, "we must give writers' wives their due, marvel at what they achieved... and reflect on what might have been." This bracing survey delivers.
