For many of us, books are an important part of our lives – but do we want them to change our ideas about how to live? Is there a danger that living alongside fictional narrators will make us too reckless? This may be the case especially when it comes to marriage, given that so many great novels are about adultery.
Recently, “bibliomemoirs” have offered a medium in which to think through the relationship between reading and living. Rebecca Mead has charted her changing relationship with Middlemarch; Sophie Ratcliffe resisted the lure of adultery while reading Anna Karenina; Francis Spufford explored the books that shaped him. Now Christina Lupton entwines her own experience of falling unexpectedly into adulterous love with a woman, aged 48, with her experiences of reading about love in books. In the early stages of this affair, she read frantically, both to seek moral guidance and to be turned on. She was in the middle of writing an introduction to Pride and Prejudice, exploring the many kinds of love explored in Austen’s novel. Urgently, she asked herself if her own love affair was the kind that Elizabeth Bennet would have (rational as well as passionate) or the kind her more self-indulgent sister Lydia would have. And she decided to write a book about the broader relationship between literature and love – from marriage to adultery, parenthood to friendship.
