Frances Wilson
Words of Love
Uncommon Arrangements: Seven Portraits of Married Life in London Literary Circles 1910–1939
By Katie Roiphe
Virago 352pp £12.99 order from our bookshop
Uncommon Arrangements explores the dynamics of seven miserable ‘marriages à la mode’. From the hell that was life with H G Wells (‘I am thinking continually’, wrote his wife, who shared him with a harem, ‘of the disappointing mess of it’) to the weirdness of being loved by Radclyffe Hall, each relationship was for the most part a self-consciously hectic arrangement involving a fair amount of bed-hopping and hypocrisy.
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