Lives of the Wives: Five Literary Marriages – A Provocative Look at Famous Writers, Jealous Rage, and the Role of Money and Power

by Carmela Ciuraru

Discover the book the Washington Post calls "A tour de force....the stories Ciuraru tells are gripping, horrific, and sometimes even funny—but most of all they are important."The New York Times has praised LIVES OF THE WIVES as "delicious....unputdownable," while The Wall Street Journal calls it "compulsively readable....Ms. Ciuraru sketches cradle-to-grave portraits of each of her subjects, with a focus on their relationships—and the effects on the wife's work—as they devolve from initial infatuation to bitter disillusionment. " ***Editors' Choice, The New York Times Book Review*** "Most anticipated books of 2023" (LitHub)*** "Best reviewed nonfiction of the week" (Book Marks)*** Starred review, Kirkus*** Starred review, Library Journal LIVES OF THE WIVES is a witty, provocative look inside the tumultuous marriages of five writers, illuminating the creative process as well as the role of money, power, and fame in these complex and fascinating relationships."With an ego the size of a small nation, the literary lion is powerful on the page, but a helpless kitten in daily life—dependent on his wife to fold an umbrella, answer the phone, or lick a stamp."The history of wives is largely one of silence, resilience, and forbearance. Toss in celebrity, 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. "It's been my experience," as the critic and novelist Elizabeth Hardwick once wrote, "that nobody holds a man's brutality to his wife against him." Literary wives are a unique breed, requiring a particular kind of fortitude.Author Carmela Ciuraru shares the stories of five literary marriages, exposing the misery behind closed doors. The legendary British theatre critic Kenneth Tynan encouraged his American wife, Elaine Dundy, to write, then watched in a jealous rage as she became a bestselling author and critical success. In the early years of their marriage, Roald Dahl enjoyed basking in the glow of his glamorous movie star wife, Patricia Neal, until he detested her for being the breadwinner, and being more famous than he was. Elizabeth Jane Howard had to divorce Kingsley Amis to escape his suffocating needs and devote herself to her own writing. ("I really couldn't write very much when I was married to him," she once recalled, "because I had a very large household to keep up and Kingsley wasn't one to boil an egg, if you know what I mean.") Surprisingly, the most traditional partnership in Lives of the Wives is a lesbian couple, Una Troubridge and Radclyffe Hall, both of whom were socially and politically conservative and unapologetic snobs.As this erudite and entertaining work shows, each marriage is a unique story, filled with struggles and triumphs and the negotiation of power. The Italian novelists Elsa Morante and Alberto Moravia were never sexually compatible, and it was Morante who often behaved abusively toward her cool, detached husband, even as he unwaveringly admired his wife's talents and championed her work. Theirs was an unhappy union, yet it fueled them creatively and enabled both to become two of Italy's most important postwar writers.

Genres: Nonfiction, Biography, History, Audiobook, Marriage, Biography Memoir, Womens

326 pages, Kindle Edition

First published February 7, 2023

About the author

Carmela Ciuraru is the author of Nom de Plume: A (Secret) History of Pseudonyms, and her anthologies include First Loves: Poets Introduce the Essential Poems That Captivated and Inspired Them and Solitude Poems. She is a member of PEN American and the National Book Critics Circle, and she has been interviewed on The Today Show and by newspapers and radio stations internationally. She lives in New York City.

Reviews

[Sharon Orlopp · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lives of the Wives: Five Literary Marriages follows the five marriages of Una Troubridge and Radclyffe Hall (the only lesbian marriage in the book), Elsa Morante and Albert Moravia, Elaine Dundy and Kenneth Tynan, Elizabeth Jane Howard and Kingsley Amis, and Patricia Neal and Roald Dahl.

Carmela Ciuraru starts the book with generalizations about women and how marriage was created to put the husband's needs first and women live in second place every day. She states that when a wife has talent and ambition, there is trouble because some egos can't handle a successful wife.

I don't believe all male writers behave the same way as those in Ciuraru's book. Stephen King is used as an example in her book as a writer who is very supportive of his wife, who is also an author.

I think strong marriages are built as partnerships where trust and open communication are critical. Women typically handle more of the household and meal responsibilities which adds to their existing workload.

[Beverly · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lives of the Wives is a fascinating glimpse into the horrific marriages of five literary couples. The only coupling that was decently harmonious was the lesbian couple of Radclyffe Hall and Lady Troubridge which didn't end well, because Hall fell in love with another woman towards the end of her life.

It was mostly the men who had the giant egos and demanded that their mates cater to their needs while they (the tortured geniuses) wrote, even when their wives were as talented as they. I wasn't familiar with any of the couples, except I knew who Kingsley Amis was and loved his most famous work, Lucky Jim. He turned out to be a rotter, even denigrating his own son's talent. It was his stepmother, the other writer in the family, who gave Martin encouragement and loaned him grand books.

I also knew Patricia Neal and Roald Dahl. I believe she was a supremely talented actress and I love his stories and children's books. Unfortunately, his talent is one of his only fine character traits. He is pretty much an ass and poor Patricia Neal suffered mightily under his control. At times, I wondered while reading this why anyone gets married.

[Jenna · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5. There isn’t anything wrong with the book other than that it did not seem to have any point whatsoever except to recount truly, actively horrible marriages between mostly horrible people who also seemed to suffer from substance use disorder, other addiction, or other significant behavioral health concerns (including narcissism and sadism) that would not have been properly understood or addressed at the time. Some of the members of these miserable dyads also happened to be writers.

Beyond this superficial level, there were no larger themes further illuminated that I could really see in terms of being a wife, or an artist, or a wife of an artist, etc. - these people could have been selling tomatoes for all that mattered. (No offense to tomato vendors - love a tomato.) The selection of couples covered seems pretty random; presumably they were just five of the known worst writerly marriages available to profile.

For me, the most interesting and still-relevant pair discussed by far is the first one, Una and Radclyffe, because at least this section demonstrates how Radclyffe’s status as a lesbian icon pioneer author belies the fact that they were also completely classist, wielded their wealth/power/privilege like an abusive asshole, and were counterintuitively heavily invested in an oppressive traditional framework of stereotyped gender roles in which they personally awarded themself the authoritarian “male” role, to Una’s severe detriment.

But aside from this reveal, which I think is still fairly superficial and has been covered elsewhere, no other great epiphanies, and kind of hard to care overall. I feel bad hating on this book a bit, but I just did not get its purpose at all. For me it was tedious and repetitive misery porn. It did not help that I didn’t particularly care about or for the work of any of the individuals profiled; if you do, things might go better for you.

[Christine Somers · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you believe that people come to committed relationships hopeful but broken, Lives of the Wives, highlight the lightening strike of attraction with the eventual failure of commitment. All five of the relationships Carmela Ciuraru describes fails not only the people in the relationship but all the people in their lives. Children, parents, friends, fellow artists, business acquaintance are all caught in the crossfire of these toxic relationships. Ciuraru believes that because these folks are writers and creatives that theirs is a different union. I do not believe that. It is not the literary aspect of the marriage that does the damage but the out of balance power structure of the relationships that is toxic and with the addition of money, fame and a public platform we see more than is good for anyone.

[Jane · Rating 3 out of 5]

It’s amazing what some women put up with just to be married….this is a book that has to be read with some idea of the social mores of the times that these couples inhabited and the pressures put on women to have a husband and to, especially in Patricia Neal’s case (where she horror of horrors was the main breadwinner) subjugate herself to an insufferable ego that was her husband. It’s an interesting and readable book that makes it clear that an unbounded ego can ruin everything without the egoistic even realising why.

[Jennifer · Rating 3 out of 5]

I received this as an eGalley from NetGalley.

Yowza this *was* about the lives of the wives- but wow were there some tremendously shitty husbands.

[Brigid · Rating 5 out of 5]

“The problem with being a wife is being a wife,” Carmela Ciuraru writes, and I silently wonder if I can get a tee shirt made with this sentence plastered all over it. Here’s how any person can tell the institution of marriage is a long way from being considered a fully equal partnership: no such corresponding book focused on husbands in any industry putting their careers on hold and fully catering to their wives’ needs exists as of this writing.

Lives of the Wives: Five Literary Marriages is an excellent book about severely lopsided marriages, as well as “how women have defined themselves through or in opposition to men, and […] reveals the toll of the creative process—not only on writers, but on their partners and children. This is a book about money and fame and how those elements can unite a couple when love does not. It’s about power and the negotiation of power.” I was hoping for a book full of juicy gossip, stories about men and women behaving badly, and thoughtful considerations on the many ways that literary spouses specifically are expected to be the uncredited supporting role within their own married life. This is EXACTLY the book that I wanted to read!

As I read Lives of the Wives, a very tight competition emerged within my mind among all of the individuals profiled, which I liked to call “Who’s the Biggest Jerk?” Although the race ultimately became something of a photo finish, here’s a small selection of the top contenders!

Writer and theater critic Kenneth Tynan excels at being a jerk on multiple fronts. Tynan displays an appalling array of abusive behavior, from subjecting his wife, writer Elaine Dundy, to humiliating beatings during sex, all the way to loudly resenting her professional success as an author: “Ken felt emasculated and betrayed. ‘You weren’t a writer when I married you!’ he yelled one night as he threw a copy of her book out the bedroom window.” Tynan receives an astounding amount of help from Dundy, as she makes sure the final draft of his drama critic column is submitted just before deadline each week, and even takes responsibility for “the nasty, threatening letter he had written to his editor in a fit of rage.” For all of her hard work propping up the career of a thoughtless husband, Dundy is rewarded with no such special treatment from Tynan in her own writing career: “Ken had not made the writing process easy for his wife. Whereas he had his study as a refuge for creative work, Elaine wrote each day ‘slowly and steadily’ on the living room sofa with a typewriter propped up on her knees. Her back hurt. She resisted the urge to drink, forcing herself to stay sober before sitting down to write. Discipline took a lot out of her.”

Novelist Kingsley Amis lives an “idyllic existence” as his second wife, novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard, is forced to take complete control of every aspect of their household: “She scheduled her husband’s medical appointments. She handled the household budget—he couldn’t be bothered, though their finances were in a precarious state—and served as his chauffeur. (Kingsley refused to drive and was afraid to travel on the Underground. He said that he cured himself of this fear by never riding the Tube again.)” Although Amis maintains a “steady and prodigious” output as a writer, Howard’s own writing output suffers due to her countless household obligations: “She was constantly, and understandably, exhausted and would often fall asleep, upright in a chair, after dinner.” After Howard finally has enough of the marriage and leaves, Amis is outrageously ungrateful for all of her past efforts and hard work: “As for Jane, he never forgave her, never spoke to her again, and told people that meeting her was the worst thing that ever happened to him.”

Sculptor and translator Una Troubridge, although not exactly in the same jerk league as Kenneth Tynan and Kingsley Amis, also deserves special mention as a particularly neglectful mother. Troubridge, whose relationship with author Radclyffe Hall is the only LGBT relationship featured out of the five couples profiled, has a young daughter nicknamed Cubby who only seems to exist as a baton to be handed off: “[…] Cubby was often left with friends, relatives, nannies, and neighbors, and at one point, Una even asked Dr. Crichton-Miller whether Cubby could live with his family. (He declined.)”

I love the use of parentheses by Carmela Ciuraru throughout this book! The author strikes gold again when later describing Hall and Troubridge’s foray into the world of dog breeding: “They were exceedingly good at it, setting up kennels and entering into competitions with their dachshunds, griffons, and more. (Una showed far more affection toward her dogs than she had ever given Cubby.)” I was fascinated with this book from start to finish, and highly recommend this book (which I happily rate as five-out-of-five-stars!) to other looky-loos and rubberneckers!

[Alison · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5. Wow some people are so bad at being married! Each of these profiles of a literary celebrity marriage was fascinating, though I’m not sure they really illustrated the author’s thesis or cohered strongly enough to warrant inclusion in the same book. I was certainly riveted by all of these stories though—the final section about Roald Dahl and Patricia Neal’s marriage was one of the most insane things I’ve ever read.

[Bronwyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Overall I really enjoyed this! I knew of most of the people (sorry to Elsa, Alberto, and Kenneth) but really enjoyed these brief biographies. Some people were given more time than others, but it was all interesting and a of jumping off point if you want to learn about them. I need to read more of these men and women, though!

[Heman · Rating 3 out of 5]

The subject matter is interesting and intriguing, but I feel as if the book infrequently rises above a cut and paste job of what is on, say, Wikipedia or other books. There are repetitions and weird juxtapositions throughout the book that just feel tired and uncomfortable. The wordings often sound as if they were dumbed down. In fact I read quotes that were paraphrased or simplified.
Then there are quotes that repeated in different places.

We read about literally women (and in one case, a stage and film actor—Patricia Neal) who get into marriages with “the great literary genius” and often mentally unbalanced men ( exception here should be given to Alberto Moravia, he sounded like a balanced person on the whole and I don’t think anyone thinks he was a genius, while the wife, Elsa Morante sounds like the unusual one) Surprise, surprise! The result is often disastrous and disappointing and well, cringy. Blame norms, society what not, but this is mostly the case of incompatible couples. Maybe being the great writer always comes at the expense of family life. Maybe great writers are by default monstrous people. At the end I just felt exhausted by descriptions of disagreements and lead-ups to breakups. But some parts are entertaining. I specifically liked Elizabeth Jane Howard and Kingsley Amis part. Again the narrative is all over the place, but the details were more entertaining for me.

[Deborah · Rating 3 out of 5]

Entertaining enough, though I can’t wholeheartedly recommend this look at six 20th-century marriages between writers and/or artists. Many of the featured writers were unknown to me, or I’d heard the name but never read anything by them, and in any case, marriage after marriage demonstrated that when an artistic or writing woman marries a writer, her art will suffer or cease to exist as all is subsumed in creating a home and catering to the Great One’s needs and especially feeding his massive ego. Rotten marriages all, and one wonders how and why the women put up with it.

[Kate · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read this in preparation for a book group with the author. The premise of this book was so interesting: an inside look at 5 literary marriages, where both partners were writers. One of the requirements was that they both were deceased, so this marriages were all from the early to late 20th century. The overarching theme was that despite her talent, the wife in the marriage was expected to keep the house, plan or arrange the meals and manage their lives while being the main parent, thus leaving the male author, who always was the more "important" writer, free of responsibilities except for writing. There was one lesbian couple and they, too, fell into traditional roles. Surprisingly, even those wives with more talent took on these roles, at least for a while. Unsurprisingly, there was a lot of alcohol use as well as emotional and physical abuse. Once the wives left these marriages, their writing resumed and the overall quality of their lives improved. Well-researched and well-written, this is a book that deserves to be more widely read. In the book group, Carmela Ciuraru provided background about her writing and research and more information about the couples. A very worthwhile book and group.

[Pascale · Rating 3 out of 5]

A lively and perceptive account of 5 famous partnerships, all of them dysfunctional. All the husbands in this book behaved atrociously, except for Moravia who, at least in this telling, was mostly supportive of his wife even though she made a habit of hurling abuse at him for no reason. It's astounding to me that beautiful and talented women like Elizabeth Jane Howard and Patricia Neal had so little sense of self-worth, but seing current statistics for feminicide I fear nothing much has changed since their day.

[Natalie · Rating 4 out of 5]

- 3.5
- fun fact: this is the first book (thats not a graphic novel) ive read in an ebook format (i.e., on my ipad!) ive generally been averse to it because of distractions, but this one worked well for me. maybe ill try more in the future.
- i really liked the topic/concept behind this book, and generally found it very interesting. i actually wish we learnt more about some of the more famous couples she had named in the beginning, because i am not familiar with their dynamics. overall im glad i read this, and actually want more !!
- the first two couples i found fascinating (Radclyffe Hall and Una Troubridge; and Alberto Moravia and Elsa Morante) because they were subversive in some way. the rest of them were kind of meh and i wished were shorter just because i was bored of them. roald dahl + patricia neal were probably the best of the other 3 (in terms of interestingness). i cant pinpoint what it was, but probably something about having children and being american and their conventionally bad relationships and lots of name dropping in their chapters being/acting like celebrities ("celebrities" of their time, id never heard of any of them or most of the people being name dropped) was what made me tire of them faster lol.
- agree with other reviewers that some more critical analysis would have been nice in each chapter (they were basically indepth chronicles of the couple's lives/relationships), but i actually disliked the authors voice in the intro (i had tried reading this as audiobook over christmas and never got past the intro bc of it) so on second thought maybe its better off this way lol

[Kirstin · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was probably more like a 2.5* rounded up. The author didn’t seem to deliver what she promised, which was a look at the role of wives in marriages to successful writers, writers who are often tumultuous with massive egos that are in constant need of validation. Instead this book felt like an aimless senior thesis. The author profiled five marriages with little critical analysis. It felt more like basic biographical summaries about mostly awful people in awful relationships, and so many affairs. I may have enjoyed it more if I had been familiar with more of the authors. I really only knew Martin Amis and Roald Dahl. It turns out the beloved children’s author is an antisemetic bully.

[Ashley · Rating 2 out of 5]

Sadly this was depressing and boring.

[Patricia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not as interesting as I expected.

[Stacy Wilhoit DeCoste · Rating 4 out of 5]

Of the five couples featured, I was most familiar with Roald Dahl and Patricia Neal. I had heard stories that he was a tyrant and an antisemite, and so I was surprised to learn they were married for 30 years. Patricia Neal was a very successful actress, with money of her own, yet she desperately wanted a marriage and children. The true love of her life, Gary Cooper, would not divorce his wife, so she ended up marrying Dahl, even though she didn't love him. Another couple, Kingsley Amis and Elizabeth Jane Howard were equally doomed. He demanded that she serve him his meals, keep his house and manage the household affairs, so that he could have time and leisure to write. Howard was a writer also, but it was much more difficult for her to find time for herself. While I was not familiar with the other three couples (Elsa Morante and Alberto Moravia, Elaine Dundy and Kenneth Tynan, Una Troubridge and Radclyffe Hall), the themes of narcissism, rage, and uncontrolled drinking rang throughout. And when there were children living in these households, they were truly the ones who suffered the most. Such sad stories.

[Theresa]

For me this fell flat. There was no particular theme that united the choices of the couples portrayed. Moreover, the chapters lacked unique insight into their stories. This all read as if it were cobbled together by a bunch of published sources.

[Anne Green · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating exploration of the relationships of famous literary marriages: 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.

Based on the accepted wisdom that marriage is a hard act, Ciuraru's introduction summarises what inspired her to look at marriages between famous literary couples where there are glaring power imbalances. As she puts it, these are cases where you take the common problems, "toss in male privilege, ruthless ambition, narcissism, misogyny, infidelity, alcoholism, and a mood disorder or two" and stand back and wait for the marriage to implode, which the majority of them did.

The wife keeping the home fires burning while the husband gets on with creating works of genius, to the detriment of anything the wife might have created herself or the non-acknowledgement of any role the wife might have played in the creation of her husband's masterpieces, has been looked at from any number of perspectives (most recently in Anna Funder's "Wifedom") and is somewhat reductive, as there are examples that turn this on its head, e.g. George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, but as the author says, they are vastly outweighed by the former examples (of which it's not at all hard to find more, e.g. Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas, Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick).

What's made eminently clear about almost all the partnerships explored, is that the men, whether conscious or not of their chauvinism or just acting out knee jerk reactions to the constant demands of the muse, behaved very badly indeed.

[Trudy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I probably would have enjoyed this book more if I had read anything by Radclyff Hall, Kenneth Tynan, or Alberto Moravia. Consequently, I was more interested in the Patricia Neal- Roald Dahl chapter. Overall, I was left with the impression that it takes a very special type of person to dedicate one’s life to someone with a huge writer’s ego. I felt a sense of claustrophobia while reading the book, because the lives of the wives were so constricted.

[Erica · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think this book would have been more interesting if it had included more writers and wives I recognized. The author says at the beginning she chose to intentionally leave out the more well-known couples, but I feel like this was a mistake if she wanted this book to be widely read and appreciated. The most interesting section for me was the last part because I’m familiar with Roald Dahl. I’m also not really sure what the intended goal of the book was other than to reveal the screwed up personal lives and relationships of writers.

[Clara Peng · Rating 4 out of 5]

If I could, I would rate this 4.5 stars. I overall enjoyed the book, once I got my footing. However, I found the introduction to be somewhat of a misrepresentation of the entire collection, which was less inquisitive and rather more tell-all. Still extremely entertaining and thought provoking, and great insight into several lesser known stories. I have also been inspired to dive into some of the female authors, of whom I had not heard of before.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book should really be subtitled: horrible people treating each other horribly. But it was entertaining, although guiltily (it was a little too gossipy) and felt like reading a Vanity Fair article. The only odd note in the book is the long introduction - it reads exactly like a book proposal.

[Anna Greenberg]

Glad I’m not doing that!

[CSarrae · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars. Behind-the-scenes stories about terrible people who can write.

[Melissa]

Meticulously researched and quite depressing.

[❄️BooksofRadiance❄️ · Rating 4 out of 5]

Such blood curdling and insightful read.

[talia ♡]

oh FINALLY!

[Keisha J.taffe · Rating 3 out of 5]

More like 3.5 stars. Fascinating book on famous, literary marriages that focuses on the literary wives, which makes sense in light of the patriarchical society women have had to live in since the beginning of time, and as a result, in most cases, these women had to take a backseat to forward the success of their literary husbands. The exception to this narrative, only by technicality is the lesbian partnership between, Radclyffe Hall and Una Troubridge. I use the word “technically” intentionally because Radclyffe (John) though born a woman, lived as a man in thinking and expression and very interestingly held very misogynistic views about women.

Spoiler alert: to be a literary wife, you cannot have ego and your success cannot outshine theirs. You must be available to do everything, while greatness is created on the pages of critically acclaimed books, manuscripts, and screenplays by your talented and driven husband. You must be equipped to breathe life into your husband because rejection happens. A lot. You should anticipate abuse in any form, be in a constant state of loneliness while in their presence, and oh, please be prepared for one or more extramarital affairs that your husband will tell you has to because people do grow apart. And you may have a husband that has a penchant for beating and spanking violently during sex.

To say that these marriages were tumultuous is an understatement.