their decade-long ménage à trois. West was a feminist and, like Wells, believed that not acting on one’s sexual attractions was hypocritical, but Roiphe concludes that, in spite of their radical ideas, West and Wells fell into a life of traditional marital hypocrisy anyway. In the end, she feels, they succumbed to fairly outmoded, Victorian notions of marriage. Wells remained in his family and maintained his string of sexual affairs, and West married banker Harry Andrews in 1929 and went on to writeBlack Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia in 1941, among other works, and to be featured on the cover of Time magazine in 1948 as the world’s single most famous woman writer. Their son Anthony would go on to write a bitter account of his childhood.

Roiphe’s remaining portraits are equally intriguing. The short-story writer Katherine Mansfieldwho would write “Bliss,” “The Daughters of the Late Colonel,” and “The Garden Party,” among other famous storiesmarried the editor and critic John Middleton Murry, but their marriage seemed almost childish, and they spent much time apart. In her battle with tuberculosis and early death, when Murry was unable to stand by her, it was her intimate friend Ida Baker who would nurse her. Ironically, editors would consider her one of the experts on “Modern Love,” but her own marriage appears both restless and irresponsible. Elizabeth von Arnim was another famous writer, the author of the instant sensation and best seller Elizabeth and her German Garden (1898). Her feminist novels urged women to abandon their domestic responsibilities for greater freedom and travel, but she ended up marrying a controlling tyrant, Frank Russell. In the end, in what sounds like the plot of a Evelyn Waugh comic novel, she had to flee the marriage to California but still ended up in court, fighting a suit by her husband that she stole his possessionsincluding his tennis balls. The overlapping ironies in Roiphe’s narratives are rich and recurring: Von Arnim was herself at one point a mistress of H. G. Wells, and her cousin, Katherine Mansfield, had early envied her “what she saw as the ease and lightness of her lifeElizabeth had somehow managed to live a full domestic life with children and husbands, and achieve literary success.”

Roiphe’s centerpiece in these seven portraits is her chapter on Vanessa Bell, her husband Clive, and her fellow painter Duncan Grant, and their complex emotional arrangements. This triangle was close to the center of the Bloomsbury Group, that famed artistic and intellectual circle of friends that included Vanessa’s sister, the novelist Virginia Woolf; the social critic Lytton Strachey; and the economist John Maynard Keynes, among others. Vanessa and Clive felt themselves “part of a sudden, liberating break from the last remnants of Victorian propriety,” and in 1918 Vanessa was living with him in an open marriage that included her current lover, Duncan Grant, and his lover David Garnett. Her former lover, the art critic Roger Fry, called their arrangement, in apparent seriousness, “an almost ideal family based as it is on adultery and mutual forbearance . It really is rather a triumph of reasonableness over the conventions.” Vanessa managed to maintain this complicated emotional family for some time, through the death of her son Julian in the Spanish Civil War in 1937, and even the marriage of her daughter Angelica (by Grant) to David Garnett in 1942.

The ménage of Una Troubridge, Radclyffe Hall, and Evguenia Souline appears rather traditional by contrast. Hall and Troubridge were together for nearly two decades, which included the obscenity trial over Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (1928)“the first serious chronicle of a lesbian’s life to appear in print,” and a novel advertised as “the most controversial book of the century.” Troubridge maintained her firm support of Hall’s career, even during the period when Hall drew her new love Evguenia into what the French called their “trio Lesbienne,” but Troubridge had the last word when Hall fell sick. She nursed Hall through a long illness until her death and cut Evguenia out of the will. Likewise, there was the triangle of professor George Gordon Catlin; his wife, the writer Vera Brittain, author of the best-selling 1934 The Testament of Youth (an autobiographical account of the war years that brought back both the physical and psychological violence); and the friend who supported her through much of her adulthood, the novelist Winifred Holtby, author of the popular novel South Riding (1936). In their case, a ménage in which they were physically if not emotionally separated from each other seems to have worked best, and this final chapter is certainly less impassioned than Roiphe’s earlier accounts.

In her postscript, Roiphe returns to the questions she sketched out in her introduction, “Marriage à la Mode”“How does one accommodate the need for settled life with the eternal desire for freshness?” and “why do people drift apart? Why do they stay together?”and concludes that these seven couples “were torn as we are torn: between tradition and innovation, between freedom and settled life, between feminist equality and reassuring, old-fashioned roles.” Roiphe’s study is valuable for what it tells modern readers about the abiding institution of marriage, its strengths and inherent pitfalls. As she shows, “those tattered, sentimental, Victorian images of marriage that they were so eager to cast off proved more stubbornly entrenched than they would have thought possible,” and, in spite of their progressive ideas, some of these writers “were at the same time constantly reproducing traditional structures of female dependence.” Like other examples of a new literary form of writing biographyand Roiphe credits Phyllis Rose’s Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages (1983) among other recent worksher study is lateral rather than chronological, linking together like (and unlike) entities so that their juxtapositions often reveal something startlingly new. Her writing is itself fresh and inviting, and the stories she relates make literary history come alive again.