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42 of 42 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
What you didn't know about these writers..., August 18, 2007
I was lucky enough to get an advanced reader copy of this book a few months ago to review. I really enjoyed it! I happened to be reading Enchanted April, by Elizabeth Von Arnim at the time, so that was a very happy coincidence. I had read her book before, but knew nothing about her. She is one of the artists/writers profiled in this book. There are seven sections for each "couple" or "group." And definitely do not skip the opening chapter, Marriage a La Mode, th author's brillant and helpful introduction to the book and to the times these artists and their works existed.
I really loved the section on Vanessa Bell, "Bunny" and the Bloomsbury group. Simply fascinating. Her daughter Angelica later married her biological father's lover. The complicated family groups created by these people are often bizarre, even incestuous, but they seem to have worked for them to some degree. Reading about these people and their complicated lives, mostly being lived out of a desire to be free from conventional, traditional, expected roles in their times, was truly fascinating. We "tut tut" daily over Britney, Lindsey and Paris; well, they can't hold a candle to these folks! Katherine Mansfield was much more lady-like, educated and interesting than any of them. Also read about HG Wells, his long suffering wife Jane, and his lover, young upstart journalist Rebecca West.
This book seems to be very well researched and is very well written. With what I am sure is an overwhelming amount of information available on these prolific writers and their lives, Roiphe has managed to handle the subject both delicately and thoroughly enough without letting it be too much information. Certainly, the portraits in this book are compelling enough to warrant more exploration, but she manages to whet your appetite so that you want to learn more, not only about their lives, but more importantly about their work, which was their lives, and what was so desperately important to each and every writer and artist in this book.
A great read. A definite recommendation.
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31 of 33 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Life imitating art, March 15, 2008
If you've ever believed that modern relationships are more complex and unorthodox than those of the past, this magnificent book will quickly open your eyes to the truth. Katie Roiphe picks apart the tangled strands of seven couples' lives, looking for "the distilled wisdom of decades lived, of mistakes made, of love stirred by time." (p. 2) What did Katie learn?
The subjects of this book spent their childhood in the repressed Victorian age. Like some who grew up in the 1950s and 60s and came to early adulthood in the Age of Aquarius, the figures in Roiphe's book lived in a new age allowing them more freedom to defy convention -- and defy they did.
After a wonderfully expository opening chapter called "Marriage A La Mode," Roiphe devotes a chapter to each of her subjects. First we meet H. G. Wells and his wife Jane, whom he treated according to a Victorian ideal of fragile womanhood while carrying on a ten-year affair with Rebecca West, a thoroughly modern young writer.
Roiphe explores the marriage of Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murry. Their love was, by their own admission, a "child-love" that was only passionate when they were apart. Elizabeth von Arnim and Frank Russell relied on "conflict and sparring as a prelude to reconciliation." Vanessa and Clive Bell lived in an ever-shifting menage that included her former lover, and her current lover along with his (male) lover. Ottoline Morrell, who may have inspired the character of Lady Chatterley, was outraged when her husband Philip confessed that he had two pregnant mistresses. Una Troubridge and Radclyffe Hall had been a committed lesbian couple for eighteen years when Radclyffe (known to all as "John") fell in love with a Russian emigree and established what French gossip columns called a "trio lesbienne." Vera Brittain and Gordon Catlin and their children shared their homes with Vera's lifelong friend, Winifred Holtby.
The lives of these people were interwoven with family, social or sexual relationships; they were observers of and commentors on each others' dramas. The author has distilled a huge amount of primary material into this fascinating book, with no judgment or editorializing. Her notes are a treasure trove for any reader who wants to explore a wider context.
Roiphe's postscript takes the position that, however self-absorbed, the subjects of this book at least showed creativity and imagination in imposing their own mythologies on the drabness of daily life. She writes (p. 302), "This is storytelling in its most challenging medium: life itself."
Highly recommended.
Linda Bulger, 2008
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15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
tangled webs, December 7, 2007
This is such an interesting book and has so much going for it. Roiphe does a good job giving us enough background on the subjects to understand the nature of the conflicts in their relationships. I think she should have spent a little more time on how the "arrangements" may have been in conflict with the political positions and/or writings of some of the people involved, particularly in the cases of Rebecca West and Katherine Mansfield. The treatment of Vanessa and Clive Bell and Duncan Grant was well handled, though, and I appreciated the author's observations about how poorly the Bell children were served by not only their parents but also by the Bloomsbury circle. Roiphe also does a good job, for the most part, setting the social and political context of these relationships.
I didn't expect the book to be an exhaustive study of any of the subjects, so I had no sense of disappointment, as some reviewers have mentioned. Roiphe states that her intention is to sketch the relationships from the perspective of a significant point of conflict. I think she delivered on that promise. I enjoyed the writing style and the structure of the book. As the chapters move from one household to the next, Roiphe reveals in subtle ways the inter-relatedness of the literary figures of the period - through friendship, family, marriage, affairs, patronage - but the reader is never overwhelmed with the complexity of those entanglements. And beyond the primary subjects, many familiar voices of the period are heard commenting through letters, memoirs and diaries.
Roiphe rarely appears to pass judgment, which I admire. We do get a sense of her exasperation with Vanessa Bell, but in a group of such egocentric characters, Vanessa Bell seems particularly oblivious. And Roiphe didn't disguise her distaste for the manipulations of Una Troubridge, wife of Radclyffe Hall. With so many people behaving badly, selfishly, stupidly, and innocently - or sometimes maliciously - making bad life choices, the author does her best to stick to the facts. (For the record, it was Una's decision of destroy journals, manuscripts and letters that seemed to inspire Roiphe's wrath.)
In some ways, I thought the Jane and HG Wells/Rebecca West treatment was the least satisfying of the group and it seemed an odd choice to lead off the book. I'm wondering if the position has to do with Wells being reasonably well known today while the others are far from household names. This book left me perusing the bibliography for more complete biographies. Roiphe's notes are particularly helpful, as is the index. I would have liked more photographs, though.
I was drawn into these lives - all the creativity, the chaos, the intensity and passion. I don't feel the subject matter is distasteful or exploitive. These individuals consciously challenged the social and cultural mores of the day, not altogether successfully but mostly purposefully. One of the best outcomes for me was to be inspired to read, finally, Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians. These were people who wanted to remake the world even before the Great War did it for them.
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