“Lives Of The Wives” Books Won’t Save Us

“The problem with being a wife is being a wife,” writes Carmela Ciuraru in The Lives of Wives, her recent book about five literary marriages. The role has historically been unglamorous, she continues, requiring women to play the part of “chattel, cook, housekeeper, and nursemaid,” while enduring the type of struggles you’d expect when partnering with an egomaniac who happens to be a talented artist. The book’s five chapters focus on the marriages of Elizabeth Jane Howard and Kingsley Amis, Patricia Neal and Roald Dahl, and Elaine Dundy and Kenneth Tynan, among others, detailing masculine jealousy, domestic inequity, derision, and occasional good times.

It’s all “rather bleak,” as Ciuraru puts it.

Marriage is on the decline in the United States — research shows that a quarter of millennials have never been married — but books about wives remain so common that they have become a bookstore cliche. Their covers often show faceless women, headless women, women from behind. “Who is she?” they seem to want you to ask, maybe while mentally grafting your own head onto the pictures. What can we make of this genre that positions women at the center while also stressing their domestic subservience to men? What is the point of these books, and why do we keep making it?

The books encompass both fiction and nonfiction and are told in every register: academic, literary, commercial, romance, fantasy, memoir, hagiography. Some are great and some are boring. Some are unreadable shlock.

Recent entries into the genre, in addition to The Lives of Wives, include Julia by Sandra Newman, a retelling of George Orwell’s 1984 from Winston Smith’s lover’s perspective (sometimes the wives are technically girlfriends); Anna Funder’s Wifedom about Orwell’s own wife, Eileen Blair; Mark Braude’s Kiki Man Ray about Man Ray’s longtime girlfriend Kiki de Montparnasse; and Madeline Miller’s mega-bestseller Circe, about the witch who beguiles Odysseus, keeping him on her island for a year and eventually bearing his son.

The trend is not new. Véra by Stacy Schiff, about the archetype-setting Véra Nabokov, won a Pulitzer in 2000. Popular entries have appeared every few years: American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld inspired by Laura Bush (2008); The Women by T.C. Boyle about the women in Frank Lloyd Wright’s life (2009); The Paris Wife by Paula McLain about Ernest Hemingway’s first wife, Hadley Richardson (2011); Z by Therese Anne Fowler about Zelda Fitzgerald (2013); and on and on. Françoise Gilot’s Life With Picasso was published as far back as 1989. The settings change, the eras, but even as feminism has evolved in the wake of #MeToo, the form has stayed mostly static. Though the quality of the books vary by author, the content — telling the real story from the point of view of the woman — never changes. One idea persists: Great men are rarely good guys.

If I had to guess at the market reason for their enduring popularity, it would be that readers like retellings of familiar stories combined with the fact that most of the people who buy books in the United States are women. But there is also an element of correcting the record. McLain said in a 2011 interview that her book gave Hadley Richardson “an opportunity to step into the light for a moment, out of the fringes of literary history”; Sittenfeld noted the incorrect public perception of Laura Bush as “stiff, and proper, and heavily made up.” The thinking seems to be that if we recover the stories of the women who propped these men up — and often relinquished their own art to do so — we’ll rebalance the scales. (Feminism: We did it!)

Take Wifedom, for example, a record of the Orwells’ marriage, which began in 1936, before he’d written his major books, and ended in 1945 with Eileen’s tragic death while undergoing what should have been a routine hysterectomy. Funder writes in the introduction that she was inspired to write the book when she happened across a note Orwell had made toward the end of his life.

There were two great facts about women…which you could only learn by getting married, & which flatly contradicted the picture of themselves that women had managed to impose on the world. One was their incorrigible dirtiness and untidiness, The other was their terrible, devouring sexuality…

The thinking seems to be that if we recover the stories of the women who propped these men up — and often relinquished their own art to do so — we’ll rebalance the scales.

Funder reflects, “Orwell only ever lived with one wife. These comments refer to Eileen.” Disgusted, she scours biographies of Orwell (there are seven) to try to make sense of the quote in the context of their relationship. She discovers that Eileen is mostly absent from the biographies, that she is omitted from key moments, or when she is on the page, that her role has been minimized. Even in Orwell’s own nonfiction, she is all but erased. The project is born, an attempt to avenge Orwell’s dismissal of women as messy and horny, and to bring Eileen to life.

Eileen’s problem with being a wife was being a wife. Orwell was demanding, tubercular, chronically unfaithful. An Oxford grad who’d once pursued a masters in psychology, she gave it all up to cook for him, keep house both in the countryside and in Blitz-stricken London, raise their adopted son, edit and type Orwell’s writing, and provide a sounding board for his ideas. Like Orwell, she volunteered for the Spanish Civil War, playing an important role in the office of the anti-Franco Independent Labor Party and showing incredible courage.

Impressive for sure. But in her attempt to give Eileen her due, Funder sometimes stretches. The main source for the narrative is just six recently discovered letters Eileen wrote to her friend Norah. Funder dramatizes the writing of these letters almost ad absurdum, creating sections that are told from a close third perspective, essentially placing the reader in Eileen’s head. While this is entertaining, it veers close to pure fabrication. “Something – not this, but essentially this – must have happened,” reads the beginning of a chapter about a close scrape in Barcelona in which Eileen saves the day.

A problem with breathing life into marginalized figures is that there’s often not much information about them. Still, correcting the factual record is a valid aim. Even if Eileen must be semi-fictionalized by necessity, a rough portrait is better than no portrait at all — and definitely better than leaving her as a fragment. But then what of the novels? If the desired effect is to show readers that women confined to the fringes have inner lives — well, who is that insight for? Certainly not the readers themselves, who, again, as predominantly women, already know this.

What wrong is Sandra Newman’s Julia righting, for instance? Orwell was misogynistic for sure (apart from the distasteful comments, Funder’s book paints a picture of a serial sexual assailant), but things get sticky in fiction. The part of 1984 that’s often called sexist is a passage where Winston Smith imagines murdering Julia. (“Two weeks ago I thought seriously of smashing your head in with a cobblestone,” he tells her.) In another passage, Smith also notes “the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy” tend to be women. But these sentiments can’t fairly be attributed to Orwell himself. The reader is meant to see that life under the boot of fascism has helped create this attitude.

Perhaps the impetus of Newman’s book is simply that Julia is not central in Orwell’s novel. She is flat, not fully formed. In any case, the book, which was sanctioned by the Orwell estate, is excellent and absorbing. Questions of what it’s doing and whether it earns its premise fall away in the face of its quality. In a review of the book for the Los Angeles Times, a critic calls for it to be taught in schools in lieu of 1984. I wouldn’t go that far — for all his flaws, Orwell’s critique of tyranny and the surveillance state still sings — but Julia really is very good. Newman shows us, with impressive invention, and even humor, how women suffer uniquely under oppression. Her version made me wonder if these books need to reach for a corrective angle at all. Or if they should seek instead simply to succeed aesthetically, not as moral objects, but as works of art.

Orwell’s misogyny is not corrected by a book about his wife any more than the misogynist errors of Homer (the centering of male heroism? The dismissal of the monster Scylla as a bit shrill?) are corrected by Madeline Miller’s Circe. The impulse is noble, but these don’t make sense as one-for-one transactions. Even the idea of assessing the work of a poet from roughly the eighth century B.C.E. this way is pretty funny.

The problem with writing about wives is writing about wives.

The problem with writing about wives is writing about wives. These books define their female subjects in relation to men. There’s a limit to how feminist a project can be with a man at its core.

With this in mind, the most interesting book I read on this topic was Catherine Lacey’s Biography of X. The book is a meta construction, a biography narrated by the wife of a fictional famous artist. Lacey has made both spouses women, stripping the book of gender dynamics and freeing herself to explore questions of power, submission, art, and the knowability of another person.

Some parts are familiar. Does the famous wife wrong, abuse, and otherwise trammel the unfamous wife? She does. But the trammeled wife regains some agency in the end by writing the famous wife’s definitive biography, thereby reclaiming the journalism career she forfeited in service of her marriage, and reckoning with her own trammeling. No well-intentioned future writer will have to re-draw her from a fragment; the wife has already written the story of her own fragmentation.

Refreshingly forward-looking, Biography of X responds to changes in our society and conjectures what they will mean for domesticity, for the concept of the artistic genius. These days, wives can be wives to wives. That we can hurt each other in new ways, ways unrelated to misogyny — now there’s something to hope for.