2008 Dewey Decimal Project: 828.912 R
Apr. 19th, 2008 08:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rsadelleThis month's book was Uncommon Arrangements: Seven Portraits of Married Life in London Literary Circles 1910 - 1939 by Katie Roiphe. I picked it up because I kept seeing it on the new books shelf at the library, and I was intrigued by both the idea and the extremely specific title. The book is exactly what it says: portraits of marriages in London's literary world between the wars. I liked it better before I googled the author and found out who she was (I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader).
Roiphe says that "each chapter is structured around a crisis in a marriage and how it is resolved or not resolved," but that's not really true. The stories are more diffuse than that, and nothing is ever resolved because life isn't that neat. The stories are interesting, though, and nicely scandalous. Vanessa Bell (Virginia Woolf's sister), for example, lived with her husband (Clive Bell), her lover (Duncan Grant), and his lover (David "Bunny" Garnett). She had two sons with Clive and a daughter with Duncan. They raised Angelica, the daughter, as Clive's child, and, in fact, Angelica didn't know until she was an adult that Duncan was her father. She later married David.
I found myself irritated with Roiphe's habit of repetition: "The earl did not believe in affairs with members of one's own social class." Then, in the next paragraph: "He believed in affairs with members of a different class, and marriage with members of his own." I was also irked by her portrayal of Elizabeth Von Arnim's marriage to John Russell as a woman's fascination with a manly man rather than an abusive marriage. By the time I got to the end of the book, I was also bothered by the way that her conclusion was that every wife was unhappy.
I do have to give her credit for including, as one of the marriages, the relationship between Radclyffe Hall and Una Troubridge. There are also bits that made me laugh: "During this time he was mildly distracted by an affair with his housekeeper, a Miss Young, who wrote him detailed letters about his animals and the upkeep of his estate."
Overall, I found the book fun to read while reading it, and I enjoyed reading the Wikipedia articles about all of the people in it, but after I was done with it, I find myself disappointed; I think it could have been more than it is.
Roiphe says that "each chapter is structured around a crisis in a marriage and how it is resolved or not resolved," but that's not really true. The stories are more diffuse than that, and nothing is ever resolved because life isn't that neat. The stories are interesting, though, and nicely scandalous. Vanessa Bell (Virginia Woolf's sister), for example, lived with her husband (Clive Bell), her lover (Duncan Grant), and his lover (David "Bunny" Garnett). She had two sons with Clive and a daughter with Duncan. They raised Angelica, the daughter, as Clive's child, and, in fact, Angelica didn't know until she was an adult that Duncan was her father. She later married David.
I found myself irritated with Roiphe's habit of repetition: "The earl did not believe in affairs with members of one's own social class." Then, in the next paragraph: "He believed in affairs with members of a different class, and marriage with members of his own." I was also irked by her portrayal of Elizabeth Von Arnim's marriage to John Russell as a woman's fascination with a manly man rather than an abusive marriage. By the time I got to the end of the book, I was also bothered by the way that her conclusion was that every wife was unhappy.
I do have to give her credit for including, as one of the marriages, the relationship between Radclyffe Hall and Una Troubridge. There are also bits that made me laugh: "During this time he was mildly distracted by an affair with his housekeeper, a Miss Young, who wrote him detailed letters about his animals and the upkeep of his estate."
Overall, I found the book fun to read while reading it, and I enjoyed reading the Wikipedia articles about all of the people in it, but after I was done with it, I find myself disappointed; I think it could have been more than it is.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-19 09:49 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-20 05:34 pm (UTC)