BIOGRAPHY:THESE PORTRAITS of relationships offer a view of marriage that is a world away from the modern experience of childcare, double mortgages, and lives scattered like gold dust on the road between the school run and the ballet or Tae Kwon Do class, writes Vona Groarke.
In her examination of what Vera Brittain called "semi-detached" marriages, Katie Roiphe explores seven couple's attempts to redefine marriage and its limits or liberations.
Theirs was an idealistic project: the spouses featured here wished to draw back the drapes in the stuffy, overpowering parlour of Victorian marriage, what Rebecca West termed the "gross, destructive, mutual raids on personality which often form marriages". Instead, households that included lovers, ex-lovers, best friends and intimates, in addition to husbands and wives, would challenge conventional marriage with its predetermined sacrifices and inevitable confines.
These relationships proposed, in their own way, a vision of partners reworking their union so as to accommodate each other's best and most creative selves.
It was never a question of "til death do us part", but of forging relationships in which the emotional, sexual and artistic imaginations were actively sustained. Katie Roiphe, in this fascinating, fair and stylishly-written book, observes of Vera Brittain that "she wanted conventional family life, and she wanted unconventional freedom".
But could these messy, highly-charged, unorthodox arrangements really work?
Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murry set up perfect house after perfect house, few of them lasting more than three months, in a bid to find a suitable backdrop for an obsession that vivified itself with stricken separation and tumultuous reconciliation.
Their great "pioneering love", in which either of them was free to "wander off at any time", brought them back together after various affairs, but Katherine's tuberculosis backed her into simpler longings and him into a conventional, protective role that he had neither mettle nor inclination to fulfil.
That she wrote in her will, "I feel no other lovers have walked the earth more joyfully - in spite of all" rescues their story from ordinary, grubby infidelity and restores it, as they both required, to romantic fantasy.
What are we to make of Vanessa Bell sharing a farmhouse in 1918 with her husband, her ex-lover, her current lover and his (male) paramour?
The portrait offered here of them suggests they managed this extraordinary household rather well: the painters painted, the writer wrote, the critic observed ("It really is rather a triumph of reasonableness over convention", Roger Fry wrote of their affairs), and Clive Bell fussed over his wife's health, and when she had a daughter with Duncan Grant, agreed to raise the child as his own.
As it turned out, not everything could be rationalised and resolved so easily: knowing nothing of her paternity, Angelica, aged 18, made a disastrous marriage to the man who had once been her father's lover.
Money comes into it, of course, and real estate. These were arrangements made possible by privilege and the ability to maintain separate households for each relationship (as HG Wells did), or at the very least, houses large enough to accommodate a degree of discretion in their moonlit corridors and secret entrances. And there had to be money to pay off women in unfortunate circumstances - in 1917, Philip Morrell had two mistresses pregnant at once. The sorriest money story has to be that of Radclyffe Hall, Lady Una Troubridge and the woman who came between them. She was a Russian émigré nurse called Evgenia Souline, whom Hall addressed in letters as, "my darling most chinky faced tartar".
Hall made her a monthly allowance, told her what to spend it on, and docked her whenever the younger woman did something to displease her. Increasingly sidelined, Una wrote to Evgenia, "You have made me a stranger to what was once my life".
After Hall's death, her considerable fortune went to Una. Evgenia married and lived with her husband in one small room. When she was dying of cancer, Una refused to pay the doctor's bills.
Roiphe has a storyteller's eye for the revealing, sharp detail. Once we know that Radclyffe Hall and Una Troubridge kept a shrine to Hall's first lover, Mabel, in their home, with burning incense and a candlelit Madonna, we guess that this is not a story to end with fireside reminiscences of far-off, full dance cards.
Similarly, any one of us could probably have told Vera Brittain that carrying roses up the aisle that her first boyfriend had given her did not augur well for the couple's chances of conjugal bliss.
In offering the image of Katherine Mansfield circling the number of "I"s in a letter from her husband to remind herself of his self-absorption, Roiphe outlines, economically, a marriage in tailspin.
There is tragedy here, great love stories reduced to jealousy, guilt and consequence: children growing up confused and wounded; husbands or wives sidelined to loneliness; erstwhile lovers forced to witness the new round of gifts and absences that signal a new romance - all the usual endurances of the broken-hearted, the discarded or the just-not-loved-enough.
But that isn't the full story. That these were marriages based on ideas, in so far as any can be, was both opportunity and peril. Ideas are useful props for words - and these people were writers and artists who made obsessive record and analysis of every knot in their marriage ties - but are perhaps a little less effective in the management of passion with its ferocity, rewards and rues.
Should the ambition of the project be diminished, however, by the failings of the people involved to quite live up to it?
As Roiphe asks, with the intelligence that characterises this book: "Is it possible that some of these extraordinary arrangements are admirable . . . or were their efforts to romanticise unconventionality simply a defence against the limits of love?"
Vona Groarke's Lament for Art O'Leary was recently published by the Gallery Press. She teaches poetry at the University of Manchester
Uncommon Arrangements: Seven Portraits of Married Life in London Literary Circles 1910-1939 By Katie Roiphe Virago, 343pp. £12.99