The American journalist Martha Gellhorn was in Europe reporting on the second World War in 1943 when she received a telegram from her husband, who was at home in Cuba. “Are you a war correspondent or wife in my bed?” asked the husband, Ernest Hemingway.
The brief Gellhorn-Hemingway marriage – it was his third – gets only a passing mention in this group biography, but it matched in intensity and turbulence the five literary liaisons chronicled in this tasty and nourishing appetiser on partnerships where the facts often outdid the fictions. “In traditional literary marriages, the lot of the wife is rather bleak,” writes New York-based Carmela Ciuraru. “She must tend to the outsize need of the so-called Great Writer, and her work is never done.”
The longest chapter covers the 30-year marriage of the American actor Patricia Neal and the British writer Roald Dahl. She was an acclaimed Hollywood and stage actor when she married the struggling writer Dahl. “You can make the money,” a friend advised her, “but Roald must handle it ... you must do all the cooking. You must wash the dishes and do everything in the house.” Her career, independence and beauty were gone within a decade.
Elizabeth Jane Howard was a successful novelist before she married Kingsley Amis. She never felt that he was a better writer, but she was “invisible” in his presence
Another transatlantic alliance, equally dramatic and destructive, was that between New Yorker Elaine Dundy and the British theatre critic Kenneth Tynan. “You weren’t a writer when I married you,” he yelled at her when her first book was hailed in Britain and the US. He said he would divorce her if she wrote another book. “That did it,” she recalled. “Early next morning I sat down and started a new novel.”
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Elizabeth Jane Howard was a successful novelist before she married Kingsley Amis. She never felt that he was a better writer, but she was “invisible” in his presence while he received acclaim and money on a scale that she never matched.
Italian writers Elsa Morante and Alberto Moravia were married in name only for many of their stormy years together. Least acrimonious of the five partnerships was that between Radclyffe Hall and Una Troubridge, who corrected Hall’s grammar and chose her book titles, while also doing all the secretarial and promotional work.
