Literary wives are a unique breed, writes Carmela Ciuraru in the introduction to her strange new book – at which point the reader pictures Véra Nabokov either licking Vladimir’s stamps, or pulling the pages of an early draft of Lolita from the fire in which he was attempting to burn it. (“We are keeping this,” she is supposed to have said.) But no sooner has the smoke faded than alarm bells start to ring. It’s not true, is it, this statement of hers? And what’s more, she must know it. The women in Lives of the Wives, all of them the long-suffering partners of writers, could not be more different from one another if they tried; each one, in fact, is what my late father-in-law would have described wryly as a breed apart. What, you begin to wonder, is the aim of her project? What on earth might she be trying to prove?
But we’ll get back to this. Lives of the Wives is a group biography in which Ciuraru, previously the author of a book about pseudonyms, tells – and tells – the stories of five couples. Some are both writers: the Italian novelists Elsa Morante and Alberto Moravia; the English novelists Elizabeth Jane Howard and Kingsley Amis. Others are not: Elaine Dundy, the first wife of the Observer theatre critic Kenneth Tynan, began by being an actor, only becoming a writer later; Patricia Neal, whose marriage to Roald Dahl lasted 30 years, was an Oscar-winning movie star who wrote one acclaimed memoir after her divorce. Finally, there is Una Troubridge and Radclyffe Hall. While Hall is remembered now for her lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness, a book judged by a court as obscene in her lifetime, Troubridge has no real claim to fame other than her (then highly daring) relationship (before she met Hall, she had aspirations to be a sculptor; afterwards, she translated Colette). Now you begin to see the problem.
