Lives of the Wives: Five Literary Marriages

Dedication

For Terry Karten, who waited

Epigraphs

Possibly she would have been a genius if we had never met.

—F. Scott Fitzgerald

The wives . . . are buying groceries or cleaning up messes or having a drink. Their lives are concerned with food and mess and houses and cars and money. They have to remember to get the snow tires on and go to the bank and take back the beer bottles, because their husbands are such brilliant, such talented incapable men, who must be looked after for the sake of the words that will come from them.

—Alice Munro, Material

Dear Natalia, stop having children and write a book that is better than mine.

—Cesare Pavese, postcard to Natalia Ginzburg, 1941

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraphs

Contents

Introduction: What’s a Wife to Do?

Una Troubridge and Radclyffe Hall

Elsa Morante and Alberto Moravia

Elaine Dundy and Kenneth Tynan

Elizabeth Jane Howard and Kingsley Amis

Patricia Neal and Roald Dahl

Acknowledgments

Selected Bibliography

Index

About the Author

Also by Carmela Ciuraru

Copyright

About the Publisher

Introduction

What’s a Wife to Do?

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife, Jane Austen famously wrote in Pride and Prejudice. Two hundred years later, Margaret Atwood offered a riposte from the other side: Longed for him. Got him. Shit.

The problem with being a wife is being a wife. Historically, the primary function of marriage was to bind women to men as a form of property, and to protect bloodlines by producing legitimate offspring. Women existed to serve men, in every sense, and did. Wives are young men’s mistresses; companions for middle age; and old men’s nurses, Francis Bacon wrote in 1597. The fundamental predicament of womanhood can be traced back to the myth of Adam and Eve, in which female agency poses an existential threat to paradise. The creation of Eve, from the rib of Adam—woman from man—established the notion that a woman’s very existence depended upon, and was only validated by, a dominant male counterpart. In the book of Genesis, God decrees to Eve: I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be for thy husband, and he shall rule over thee. Eve was probably thinking, Kill me now, God. But the template was set.

Once upon a time, women were told that someday their prince would come. Being a wife was a badge of honor, no matter how miserable the marriage. The alternative, spinsterhood, was worse. To be a wife was to be offered up as chattel, cook, housekeeper, and nursemaid, among other things. The woman vowed to serve and obey, and legally, she ceased to exist. Of the husband, little was demanded in return. (Proverbs 18:22: Whosoever findeth a wife findeth a good thing.) The invention of marriage was a gift to men and a strategic alliance between families. Societal stability was said to depend on it. When marital relations did not go as he wished, the husband could do what he deemed necessary, apart from murder, to make things right. If he beat his wife, the law upheld his authority. He was also entitled to sex, however loveless or coerced—rape was considered a reasonable response if the wife did not comply. (In the United States, marital rape was not a crime in all fifty states until 1993.) In the thirteenth century, the English jurist and cleric Henry de Bracton, chancellor of Exeter Cathedral, declared that a married couple is one person, and that person is the husband. In 1863, Lucy Gilmer Breckinridge, a nineteen-year-old girl in Virginia—who had been keeping a journal to alleviate her boredom during wartime—fretted privately that she might never learn to love a man: "Oh what I would not give for a wife!"

The history of wives is largely one of resilience and forbearance, with countless women demonized, marginalized, misrepresented, and silenced. As they found themselves trapped in bad marriages, their husbands were free to roam in search of more and better sex. The wives buried their desires, hopes, and regrets for the greater good and in the interest of keeping the peace—all while serving as beaming helpmeet. When a husband went astray, the wife had the additional duty to reform him. It isn’t surprising that in the index of a book chronicling the history of marriage, "wives (and drunkenness)" is among the entries.

Contemporary marriage, in its ideal form, is an egalitarian, sexually fulfilling, and mutually supportive alliance, comprising love and friendship. Yet for many couples, heterosexual or otherwise, this perfect union is unrecognizable. Modern marriage is a series of compromises, a relentless juggling act of work obligations, childcare demands, household chores, money squabbles, hoarded grievances, simmering hostilities, and intimacy issues. (The burdens are more extreme at lower socioeconomic levels.) Perhaps that explains the endless discourse around the work of marriage, a predictable result of the tedium that can set in after two people have lived together for a long time. Arnold Bennett says that the horror of marriage lies in its ‘dailiness,’ Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary in 1926. All acuteness of a relationship is rubbed away by this.

Toss in male privilege, ruthless ambition, narcissism, misogyny, infidelity, alcoholism, and a mood disorder or two, and it’s easy to understand why the marriages of so many famous writers have been stormy, short-lived, and mutually destructive. Given the extraordinary works of literature that could only have been produced as a result of their marital partnerships, there’s a topsy-turvy aspect to assessing what it means to have had a failed marriage. The typical rules do not apply. (For the wife, happily ever after often means happily ever after the divorce.) Yet an ending does not always provide a clear path to salvation, even when the wife is a prominent writer. In a 2013 interview with Sharon Olds, the Pulitzer Prize–winning poet was asked whether she had reinvented herself in the aftermath of a devastating divorce. I was fifty-five, she said. I would not have known how. What I had to do was persevere.

In traditional literary marriages, the lot of the wife is rather bleak. She must tend to the outsize needs of the so-called Great Writer, and her work is never done. Literary wives are a unique breed, requiring a particular kind of fortitude. No vade mecum exists to guide them. Sooner or later, the great men turn out to be all alike, V. S. Pritchett once lamented. They never stop working. They never lose a minute. It is very depressing. It is even more depressing for their wives. The phrase I don’t know how she does it is commonly uttered about wives and mothers, with their numinous gift for serving others, but we are unlikely to hear it said of their writer-husbands. We know exactly how they do it.

With an ego the size of a small nation, the literary lion is powerful on the page but a helpless kitten in daily life—reliant on his wife to fold an umbrella, answer the phone, or lick a stamp (looking at you, Vladimir!). Those towering, mononymic geniuses of Western literature—Tolstoy, Dickens, Dostoyevsky, Hemingway, Nabokov—where would they be without their wives?

In the marriages of celebrated literati throughout history, husband is to fame as wife is to footnote. Yes, this framing is reductive, and in rare instances, the wife was the artist, served and supported by a man—or, in homosexual relationships, by a same-sex partner. But conjuring historical examples of the latter model leaves us struggling to count fingers on more than one hand. (George Eliot and Virginia Woolf come to mind.) No matter the configuration of gender or sexuality, however, the long-held and much romanticized notion of the lone genius persists, as does the stubborn myth of the tormented genius. Even in instances when the writer is mediocre at best, if nothing else he is a genius at getting others—namely, his long-suffering wife—to prop him up and perpetuate the myth of his greatness. In Diane Johnson’s superb biography The True History of the First Mrs. Meredith and Other Lesser Lives, she sets the scene perfectly:

Many people have described the Famous Writer presiding at his dinner table, in a clean neckcloth. He is famous; everybody remembers his remarks. He remembers his own remarks, being a writer, and notes them in his diary. We forget that there were other people at the table—a quiet person, now muffled by time, shadowy, whose heart pounded with love, perhaps, or rage, or fear when our writer shuffled in from his study; whose hands, white knuckled, twisted an apron, whose thoughts raced. Or someone who left the room with a full throat of sobs.

Same-sex relationships have been held up as exemplars of equitable partnerships, in which one life is not lesser than the other. In a 2014 interview, the researcher Robert-Jay Green said his findings indicated consistently that same-sex couples are much more egalitarian in their relationships. They share decision-making more equally, finances more equally, housework more equally, childcare more equally. Basically, every dimension we looked at, same-sex couples are dramatically more equal in the way they function together as a couple compared to heterosexual couples. One might assume that in a lesbian relationship in which one or both partners are writers, there exists a utopia of domestic tranquility and the nurturing of intellectual and creative desires without impediment. The reality is more complicated.

It is generally agreed that without Alice Toklas, [Gertrude] Stein might not have had the will to go on writing what for many years almost no one had any interest in reading, Janet Malcolm writes in Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice. By the time Stein met Toklas in Paris in 1907, she had long been convinced of her own genius. Stein’s ego required care and feeding, and Toklas arrived just in time. She banished doubt from Stein’s artist’s consciousness, Malcolm writes, as she would later banish the unworthy from Stein’s salon. After the couple moved in together, Toklas had a strict routine: she typically woke at six o’clock in the morning and was said to clean the drawing room herself, so that nothing would be broken. She supervised the household servants, planned meals, and typed up manuscript pages for Stein, savoring the intimacy of it: "I got a Gertrude Stein technique, like playing Bach. My fingers were adapted only to Gertrude’s work. Doing the typing of The Making of Americans was a very happy time for me," Toklas wrote in What Is Remembered. I hoped it would go on forever.

Her belief in Stein’s genius emboldened the writer further. There was no mistaking the fact that Stein was the man of the house, while Toklas played bride and muse. (Stein often called Toklas wifey.) The division of household labor between the two women, with one doing everything and the other nothing, was another precondition for the flowering of Stein’s genius, Malcolm writes, suggesting that behind every great woman is another great woman. "It take [sic] a lot of time to be a genius," Stein wrote in Everybody’s Autobiography, you have to sit around so much doing nothing, really nothing. After Stein died at the age of seventy-two in 1946, Toklas never recovered. She tended the shrine of Stein’s literary and personal legend with the devotion of a dog at the master’s grave, Malcolm writes. She would snarl if anyone came too close to the monument.

Toklas might be described as a lesbian Véra Nabokov, surely the greatest writer’s wife of all time and someone whose name has become synonymous with the art of literary wifedom. Like many wives of geniuses, Toklas, who had once been a promising concert pianist, abandoned her ambitions to serve her partner. When Toklas died at eighty-nine on March 7, 1967, she was buried next to Stein in the Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris, preserving their union in perpetuity.

Another story of a long-term marriage with an important lesbian writer, Audre Lorde, proves just as off-kilter in its spousal sacrifices. Born in Harlem in 1934 to Caribbean immigrant parents, the influential Black poet and activist boldly tackled racism, sexism, and homophobia in her work, along with other issues of social justice. In 1962, Lorde appeared to follow convention when she married a white attorney and good friend, Ed Rollins. Both were gay, and both wanted children. After having a son and a daughter, they divorced in 1970. Two years earlier, after Lorde was awarded a grant to become a poet-in-residence at Tougaloo College, a private, historically Black college in Mississippi, she met Frances Clayton, a white midwesterner who had come to Tougaloo as a visiting professor. They fell in love. Clayton was an ambitious and accomplished academic—the first woman in her department at Brown University to receive tenure—yet she sacrificed her enviable position for the woman she loved, moving to New York City to be with Lorde and her children. Finding a job after giving up a tenured position at an Ivy League institution was not easy. In her former life, Clayton enjoyed a prestigious teaching job while leading groundbreaking research on animal behavior. Now she taught introductory psychology courses at Queens College. She focused her energy on domestic chores, setting up a study just for Lorde and doing all the cooking and cleaning. The relationship allowed Lorde to remain prolific, and spared her from the kinds of wifely duties that had hampererd Clayton’s career.

As Lorde gained great acclaim in the 1970s, traveling and giving lectures around the world, Clayton stayed home to care for the children while taking courses to transition into a career as a psychotherapist. By 1984, following two brutal bouts of cancer, Lorde had become romantically involved with another woman, Gloria Joseph, whom she met at a retreat for Black feminists in 1979. Soon Lorde was traveling regularly to St. Croix, where Joseph had a vacation home. The steadfast Clayton continued to give her partner unconditional support as Lorde’s health worsened, even accompanying her to a private clinic in Switzerland for treatment.

Determined to live the rest of my life with as much joy as possible, as Lorde wrote in her journal in 1986, she moved full-time to St. Croix to be with Joseph. (A doctor told Lorde that she had less than five years to live.) The breakup was ruinous for Clayton, who had given up so much to stand by her partner of nearly twenty years. In 1992, a few months before her fifty-ninth birthday, Lorde died of liver cancer in St. Croix with Joseph at her side. Clayton died in 2012 at the age of eighty-five.

Of course, our best-known stories of literary couples are heterosexual partnerships, with the Great Writer white and male. Locked in Oedipal warfare with the literary predecessors he both admires and envies—what the critic Harold Bloom called the anxiety of influence—the Great Writer’s drive to succeed is relentless. He is charismatic and beloved, his works regarded as masterpieces, at least in his own mind. His allegiance is to Literature, but as he devotes himself to being a literary trailblazer, he also craves a stable existence at home. Someone must protect him from interruptions. As we fetishize the daily routines and rituals of famous writers—where, when, and how they like to work, what they drink or smoke to get the creative juices flowing, and so on—we ignore the ornamental wives who make everything possible, liberating their husbands from the tyranny of everyday life.

The famous carry about with them a great weight of patriarchal baggage—the footnotes of their lives, Elizabeth Hardwick wrote in Wives and Mistresses. Some of those footnotes, also known as women, have inspired poems or have seen themselves expropriated for the transformation of fiction. Hardwick spoke from experience, having had her anguished letters to her former husband, the manic-depressive poet Robert Lowell, scandalously adapted as source material in The Dolphin. She had nursed and supported Lowell for more than twenty years, through multiple breakdowns, when he abandoned her for Lady Caroline Blackwood, the Anglo-Irish aristocrat he married in 1972. His book won the Pulitzer Prize two years later. (It’s been my experience, Hardwick once wrote, that nobody holds a man’s brutality to his wife against him.) The attendants, as Hardwick called the put-upon and used-up women such as herself, have "written and received letters, been lied to, embezzled, abandoned, honored, or slandered. But there they are, entering history with them, with the celebrated artists, generals, prime ministers, Presidents, tycoons."

There they are too with the celebrated writers. The literary wife is not unlike Ariadne, who in Greek mythology aids Theseus in his epic quest to slay the Minotaur. She ensures the return of her beloved by supplying him with the means to kill the Minotaur (a sword), as well as the means of escape (a red spool of thread that will lead him to safety). She advises Theseus to tie one end of the thread near the entrance of the Labyrinth, letting it unroll as he ventures deeper in, then following it back to the entrance after slaying the monster, where she awaits him. Theseus promptly abandons her on the island of Naxos. There are many versions of this myth: one ends with Ariadne hanging herself, while another tells us that Theseus left her to die before she was rescued by the god Dionysus, who claimed her as his wife. No version ends well for her.

In the context of writers’ marriages, the manuscript is the monster to be slain. The faithful wife, having given her husband the tools and conditions required to succeed in his quest, awaits the return of the brave genius like a welcoming light at the end of the creative tunnel. Like Ariadne, sometimes she too is abandoned, left for dead.

The ideal wife of a famous writer has no desires worth mentioning. She lives each day in second place. Rather than attempt to seize control of her own fate, she accepts what she has been given without complaint. Her ambitions are not thwarted because she doesn’t have any. What does it mean to be unambiguously a woman? wrote Carolyn Heilbrun in Writing a Woman’s Life, her groundbreaking 1988 feminist study. It means to put a man at the center of one’s life and to allow to occur only what honors his prime position. Yet the wife may sometimes feel beaten down by loneliness, drudgery, and a persistent lack of purpose. (Marriage, Susan Sontag once wrote in her journal, is based on the principle of inertia.) Perhaps being loved by a powerful man isn’t enough. She may wonder, as she folds the laundry, pays the bills, or brings her husband another cup of coffee, whether she has wasted her life. Surely her husband cannot be held accountable for any perceived misdeeds. Everyone is quick to say Dickens was a bit of a shit, did not treat his wife very nicely, the actor Ralph Fiennes said in a 2012 interview of the man he was portraying on screen. But he was churning with creative imagination. In other words, Dickens may have treated Catherine, the mother of his ten children, with indefensible cruelty, but c’est la vie, the man was a genius.

If the literary wife is lucky, she plays a more active role in her spouse’s work, perhaps as first reader or editor. Joy Davidman, a divorced Jewish American single mother who had been regarded as a child prodigy and who won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize in 1938, is better known, if at all, as Mrs. C. S. Lewis. She converted to Christianity and became her husband’s intellectual partner, essentially serving as coauthor while he worked on his novel Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold. Whatever my talents as an independent writer, she revealed in a letter, "my real gift is a sort of editor-collaborator like Max Perkins, and I’m happiest when I’m doing something like that." She died from breast cancer at forty-five.

When a wife has ambitions of her own—and worse, talent—there’s bound to be trouble. In 1943, while Ernest Hemingway’s third wife, Martha Gellhorn, was reporting from war-torn Europe, he cabled her plaintively from his home in Cuba: Are you a war correspondent or wife in my bed? The Irish writer Edna O’Brien was working for a pharmacist in Dublin when she married the novelist Ernest Gébler in the summer of 1954. He was sixteen years older and this was his second marriage. Upon reading the manuscript of her debut novel, The Country Girls, he told her: You can write and I will never forgive you. The threat of writerly rivalry was too much to bear. When O’Brien’s book was published in 1960, she became famous at the age of thirty. (Attempting to be a good wife, she had used part of her meager advance to buy a sewing machine.) He was very angry, very resentful, very undermined, their elder son, Carlo, later said of his vindictive and controlling father. He felt reduced by her literary success. He felt in some way the acclaim should be pointed towards him and that he was the person who helped her to become the writer she became. Gébler sabotaged opportunities that came her way: after the publication of O’Brien’s second novel, The Lonely Girl, in 1962, he intercepted a letter from a London theater producer who wished to adapt the book into a musical. Posing as O’Brien’s agent, the nonexistent Edward Cresset, Gébler replied to say that the rights were not available—but The Love Investigator, a novel by Ernest Gébler, was up for grabs and even better. The marriage ended soon after.

For some literary couples, dual egotism has its advantages. As Joan Didion’s husband, John Gregory Dunne, once said, If I weren’t married to a writer, I couldn’t be as self-absorbed as I am. (For her part, Didion said in an interview that she and her husband were terrifically, terribly dependent on one another.) Often the independent-minded women who pursue literary careers are referred to as women writers. A male writer is just a writer. Being a woman writer, however, suggests something exotic and unexpected, like a monkey who can play chess or speak French.

If we think of literary wifedom as a narrative genre, it might be described as some blend of romance—turbulent, passionate, highly charged—and dystopian literature. (The Oxford English Dictionary defines dystopia as an imaginary place or condition in which everything is as bad as possible.) One of the twentieth century’s most famous and tragic literary relationships began the night Sylvia Plath met Ted Hughes, that big, dark, hunky boy, at a party in Cambridge, England, in 1956. He kissed her bang smash on the mouth, and she bit him on the cheek, drawing blood. Such violence, and I can see how women lie down for artists, she wrote in her journal afterward. The poets married four months later. Plath went on to describe the the big, blasting, dangerous love of their relationship, and although her ambition matched his, she struggled with her dependence on Hughes—admitting privately that my whole being has grown and interwound so completely with Ted’s that if anything were to happen to him, I do not see how I could live. I would either go mad, or kill myself. She toggled back and forth in her journals between wanting to please her husband and craving an identity separate from his. Make him happy: cook, play, read . . . never accuse or nag—let him run, reap, rip—and glory in the temporary sun of his ruthless force, she wrote in one entry. But in the summer of 1958, she confided: I must be myself—make myself & not let myself be made by him. On February 11, 1963, after Hughes had left her for another woman, Plath committed suicide while her young children slept in the next room. It was an ending in which everything was as bad as possible.

In the official marital record, who gets to be chronicler and narrator? Lives of the Wives is a project of reclamation and reparation, paying tribute to the women who have served as agents, editors, managers, publicists, proofreaders, translators, amanuenses, confidantes, cheerleaders, gatekeepers, and housekeepers to famous writers, providing emotional, practical, and even financial support. They were saviors and caretakers, enablers and collaborators.

Behind every great man is a great woman, or so the saying goes. (Groucho Marx famously quipped: Behind every successful man is a woman, and behind her is his wife.) In examining the lives of famous authors, it is time to reposition the wife. We must give writers’ wives their due, marvel at what they achieved and made possible, and reflect on what might have been. These remarkable wives possess what Joan Didion once described, in another context, as a genius for accommodation more often seen in women than in men.

Lives of the Wives honors the paradoxes, constraints, and unexpected rewards of these asymmetrical partnerships. (Even in marriages in which both spouses were writers, women often felt eclipsed and fought to claim the right to their own success.) This is a book about marriage as fairy tale and marriage as nightmare. Many of the world’s most esteemed writers were high-maintenance partners, utterly dependent on the wives who provided the support they needed to function. It would be difficult to write about Véra without mentioning Vladimir, the artist Saul Steinberg once remarked, but it would be impossible to write about Vladimir without mentioning Véra.

In a 2014 interview with the New York Times, the great short story writer and novelist Lorrie Moore pined for a Véra of her own. She spoke of the challenges of being a divorced single mother, holding a job as a creative writing professor while keeping up with her own work. It’s hard, she said. There are some men I know who are teaching and writing who are single fathers. But not many. Most of them have these great devoted wives, some version of Véra Nabokov. Writers all need Véra. In fifty-two years of marriage, among many other duties, Véra guided her husband’s career, negotiated his contracts, typed his manuscripts, and yes, licked his stamps. She famously stopped her husband from incinerating an early draft of Lolita, salvaging charred pages from the fire and telling him: We are keeping this. More than a manuscript savior, Véra also served as his bodyguard, carrying a pistol in her handbag to protect him.

For many creative women burdened by the exigencies of family life, writing is an act of defiance. Shouldn’t they be doing something else? The answer is always yes. Maybe that’s why Toni Morrison began her first novel, The Bluest Eye, as an undergraduate at Howard University and did not complete it until after her divorce, when she returned to writing as a single mother. The poet Anne Sexton once described the difficulties of navigating marriage, motherhood, and a desire for creative accomplishment, admitting to a psychotic break when she was twenty-eight: I was trying my damnedest to lead a conventional life, for that was how I was brought up, and it was what my husband wanted of me. But one can’t build little picket fences to keep nightmares out. She committed suicide in 1974.

Unfettered writing time has often been some combination of impossible feat and wishful thinking for many women, even bestselling authors. The novelist Ann Patchett once lamented the demands of domesticity: How exhausting it is, as a woman, to always be the one who has to make the food and change the beds, she said in a 2016 interview with the Guardian. No matter how enlightened, how much of a feminist I am, I am still doing all of it. With every book I think: well, if this one’s really successful, maybe I won’t have to make dinner any more. She expressed skepticism toward the sacrosanct advice about writing every day. Don’t you think men are the ones that always say that? she said. I’m not sure I’ve heard a woman say you have to write every day. They’re too busy making dinner. I go through long periods of time when I don’t write, and I’m fine.

Little seems to have improved over time. In a 1981 interview, Rebecca West was asked whether it had become easier for women to pursue their vocations. I don’t know, she said. It’s very hard. I’ve always found I’ve had too many family duties to enable me to write enough. I would have written much better and I would have written much more. Oh, men, whatever they may say, don’t really have any barrier between them and their craft, and certainly I had. Virginia Woolf gave a name to the predicament that disproportionately afflicts women: the Angel in the House, a certain phantom that excels at family life and self-sacrifice, dissuading women from putting pen to paper. It was she who bothered me and wasted my time and so tormented me that at last I killed her, Woolf wrote of the Angel. . . . I turned upon her and caught her by the throat. . . . I acted in self-defence.

Not all writers with a Véra of their own behave without regard for their wives. Stephen King has attributed his success in part to his wife, Tabitha: The combination of a healthy body and a stable relationship with a self-reliant woman who takes zero shit from me or anyone else has made the continuity of my working life possible. The novelist Norman Rush has also spoken about the support of his wife of more than fifty years, and when their son was young, the couple split their workday to ensure equal parenting. In a profile that appeared in the New York Times in 2013, the journalist Wyatt Mason wrote: Not a literary spouse who stealthily delivers cups of tea to the genius in the attic, Elsa is what Rush calls ‘a partner in the process,’ which he describes as ‘a battle waged in common.’

Throughout history, many women have stepped up as creative partners while also ensuring that every spousal whim was catered to, no matter how carnal, petty, tedious, or bizarre. (Véra Nabokov cut up her husband’s food for him at mealtime.) Some of these women remained loyal even as they were belittled, tormented, and abused, and as their husbands attempted to manipulate and destroy them. The British critic Kenneth Tynan encouraged his American wife, Elaine Dundy, to write, expressing confidence in her talent—then fumed as her first novel became a bestseller. Threatening divorce, he warned her not to publish another book, and in response she began writing a new novel the next morning. Similarly, Roald Dahl enjoyed basking in the glow of his movie star wife, Patricia Neal, until he despised her for earning more money than he did and felt emasculated by her fame. She was advised by a friend of his that if she wished to repair her marriage, she could go on being the breadwinner as long as her husband controlled the bank account—and she must do all the cooking and cleaning. Elizabeth Jane Howard knew that to fully devote herself to writing, she had to divorce Kingsley Amis. Throughout their marriage, Howard admired her husband’s rate of production and felt that his discipline was a marvelous example, but, as she once admitted, I didn’t have the same time to do it. Her energy was consumed by his needs, leaving her to take up gardening as her primary creative outlet. All three of these couples were enviably picture-perfect, and all were adept at keeping up appearances to mask the misery behind closed doors.

The marriage of the Italian novelists Elsa Morante and Alberto Moravia was uneasy from the start. Morante stands apart from the other wives in this book by being the least self-sacrificing and nurturing. She was nonetheless a woman overshadowed by her more famous and prolific husband, and one who struggled with creative ambition in ways that he did not. And, like many writers’ wives, Morante had a spouse who often made her feel ignored, unwanted, taken for granted. She craved her husband’s attention, but he was never quite present.

Although the couple shared an intellectual intensity, they were sexually incompatible and never in love. Given the insuperable problems in their relationship, there was little chance the marriage could endure. The volatile Morante often behaved aggressively toward her husband—berating him in public, humiliating him, erupting in fury at random moments. Moravia was cool and detached, as emotionally available as a rock—and his indifference and mild manner only drove his wife to further rage. She was also known to treat women with something like contempt, leading some friends to regard her as a misogynist. (Friendship did not dissuade her from unfiltered remarks: Morante once invited her editor, the esteemed novelist Natalia Ginzburg, out to dinner, only to inform Ginzburg that