Although I was leaning heavily towards reading about Mrs Beeton I have to admit that a glance at those 400+ pages and the tiny print made me hesitate. Since I've not read any nonfiction this year, I should probably start with something a little shorter that I know I can finish in a reasonable amount of time. So Katie Roiphe's Uncommon Arrangements: Seven Marriages in Literary London 1910-1939 it is, and from the comments that I received on my previous post I think I made the right decision. I'm reading the introduction at the moment and it's fascinating. I'm familiar with at least some of the people Roiphe is going to talk about, but even if I'm not she has such an engaging style that it should be interesting irregardless.
"Out of a slew of possible 'marriages à la mode', I have chosen as my subjects writers and artists, and one hostess with artistic leanings--in other words, those inhabiting the fringe of respectable citizenry--in part because their marriages are interesting, and in part because they obsessively record and narrate their inner lives in ways that some people may find bizarre, and even distasteful. I have chosen some figures who are still quite well known, like the writer and social critic H.G. Wells, and the painter Vanessa Bell, who was Virginia Woolf's sister, and others, like Vera Brittain and Elizabeth von Arnim, who are less well known now but were bestselling authors and influential figures of the time. In the end, many of the couples in this book raised their personal lives to the level of philosophy. They felt that their love affairs and marriages were themselves creative acts."
The couples she is going to talk about are: H.G. & Jane Wells, Vanessa & Clive Bell, Ottoline & Philip Morrell, Radclyffe Hall & Una Troubridge, Vera Brittain & George Gordon Catlin, Elizabeth von Arnim & John Francis Russell, and Katherine Mansfield & John Middleton Murray. In the introduction Roiphe talks about the attitudes of the period, which were conducive to these sorts of experiments in unusual relationships. Coming out of a strict Victorian mindset and the devastation of WWI it's not surprising that couples were rewriting the rules of marriage, or at least trying something different. I want to share one more passage, which is pretty lengthy, but sets the tone of the book.
"I was drawn to the period spanning the two world wars in part because it was as richly conflicted as our own. The lives of the writers and artists emerging from the Edwardian period bridged an enormous gap in attitude: their earliest education was infused with the exquisite restraint of the Victorians, and they came of age amidst the seductive freedoms and sexual frankness promised by the new century. Reading their own accounts, one almost feels that they carried lodged within them two complete worlds. They watched streets fill with the first automobiles. They listened to the gossip about King Edward VII and his mistress, Mrs Keppel. They visited the first Post-Impressionist Exhibition, which scandalized the art world with paintings of Matisse, Gauguin, Cézanne, and Picasso. They read the first navy blue editions of Ulysses, which were printed in Paris. They watched as the novels Lady Chatterly's Lover and The Well of Loneliness were banned for obscene content. They jettisoned the clutter and the wallpaper and heavy drapes of the Victorian interior and created fashionably stark spaces in their homes. And the clash between the two very different sensibilities, the Victorian and the Modern, would be written into their most personal decisions, their marriages subject to the same tensions, the same electric contradictions. They were destined to construct their personal lives on that highly unstable spot, poised between an intense nostalgia for traditional ways of doing things and great hunger for equality and progress."
I wanted a book that would really grab me and I think I've found it in this one.