There are plenty of famous couples, and people seem to be
fascinated with reading about their personal lives. Katie Roiphe's
latest work of nonfiction, UNCOMMON ARRANGEMENTS, takes the
celebrity couple story, turns it on its head and gives it a
decidedly literary treatment.

Roiphe's work examines seven literary London couples between 1910
and 1939. 

It was a time of great social change in a city upended by one world
war and tense with the coming of another. Women especially were
challenging Victorian mores and experimenting with new ways of
engaging in relationships. The couples in this book were all in
what Roiphe labels “progressive” marriages; they were
often open to affairs or more generally concerned with
“questions of freedom and attraction.” And, as these
couples were all more or less creative to begin with, she writes
that “they felt their love affairs and marriages were
themselves creative acts.”

Roiphe goes one step further than just sharing with readers these
“uncommon arrangements.” She starts each discussion at
a moment of crisis in the relationship and uses that moment to
begin to examine the relationship itself: its dynamics, history,
and how it met --- or did not meet --- the needs of each person.
Luckily for the author, and for us, all of these people left behind
correspondence, memoirs, journals and inspired biographies; there
is a lot of material to examine and use to create a fairly clear
picture of each marriage. In the end, though, these relationships,
like all relationships, are mysterious. What really motivated each
person is nearly impossible to tell. But Roiphe's book makes the
speculation fun and interesting.

Perhaps the most compelling couple (and the most successful
chapter) is Katherine Mansfield and her husband John Middleton
Murry. First we see their somber portrait, a photograph of the
young, serious couple, and then we read the account of their even
more somber wedding day. Roiphe draws us in from the start.
Mansfield was an eccentric, and Murry was immediately attracted to
her figure and personality. She was already known as a short story
writer, and he was a student at Oxford. They moved dozens of times
in the first years of their marriage, often followed by Katherine's
closest friend Ida Baker. For love and sex she often turned to
other men (including Bertrand Russell). While Mansfield and Murry
never divorced, they were often apart, lonely in their marriage to
each other but unwilling to give up the romantic notion of
themselves. “Her idea of him,” writes Roiphe, “as
in many marriages, was more powerful, more fiercely potent than any
mere reality.” This is a strong theme throughout UNCOMMON
ARRANGEMENTS: the ideals of marriage for these bright and creative
people rarely held up against the realities.

The literary circle that makes up the couples examined was rather
small and incestuous; we often read about one person from the
viewpoints of several relationships. Virginia Woolf, the sister of
Vanessa Bell and the subject of one chapter, makes many appearances
in the book, adding her opinions of various characters and unions.
We may not learn much about early-20th century London in general
from this book, but we learn volumes about a particular early-20th
century London.

Some of the couples spotlighted were simply mismatched, or perhaps
they grew apart over time. Others were damaged by affairs or
emotional cruelty. None were traditional in their marriages, even
if deep down they longed to be. Radclyffe Hall, another subject of
the book, talked about the “infinite sadness of fulfilled
desire,” and that deceptively simple statement describes so
many of the marriages Roiphe examines.

This is, without a doubt, a good book. But still it is fair to ask,
Why read it? UNCOMMON ARRANGEMENTS is not a
self-help manual, or one that discusses the clinical psychology of
marriage. Roiphe herself admits that her interest “in these
lives is not purely the interest of a scholar.” She says that
her interest is selfish; she wants to know what these marriages can
teach us. She writes that she is after the “distilled wisdom
of decades lived, of mistakes made, of love stirred by time.”
And while a cynic could dismiss this book as a fancy, intellectual
version of celebrity gossip and voyeurism, Roiphe goes far beyond
that to bring to the subject --- in addition to an honest curiosity
about these unusual and often brilliant figures and their even more
unusual relationships --- a dignity and respect for their lives and
loves, and ultimately, for the institution of marriage
itself.