Famous Writer Couples

Sometimes, for better or for worse, writers find each other and have affairs with, or marry, or live with each other. Some relationships are happy, some not. Some are longlasting, some not. Below are a few famous writer couples.

Mary Shelley and Percy Bysshe Shelley
Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning
Virginia Woolf and Leonard Woolf
Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West
Simone de Beauvoir and Jean Paul Sartre
Simone de Beauvoir and Nelson Algren
Zelda Fitzgerald and F. Scott Fitzgerald
W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood
Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett
Mary McCarthy and Edmund Wilson
Jean Stafford and Robert Lowell
Elizabeth Hardwick and Robert Lowell
Lady Caroline Blackwood and Robert Lowell
Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes
Tess Gallagher and Raymond Carver
Jane Kenyon and Donald Hall
Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris
Bharati Mukherjee and Clark Blaise
Ayelet Waldman and Michael Chabon

Dickens Fandom

An 8/29/11 New Yorker article, “Dickens in Eden,” reminds us that although Dickens wrote with great scorn about America after his visit here almost 170 years ago, at least some Americans nowadays adore his work, and feel they can learn everything about human nature from his novels. Illustrating this passionate love for Dickens, the article’s author, Jill Lepore, describes her visit to the annual Dickens camp (officially called Dickens Universe) at the beautiful University of California, Santa Cruz campus. This camp provides a week full of lectures, reading seminars, films, rehearsals for and the performance of an original farce, workshops, a Victorian tea, and a Victorian dance. The lecturers are professors from many universities who contribute their lectures unpaid, out of love for the topic and the camp. One of the great things about this camp is that attendance is not just for Dickens scholars and professors, but for anyone who is interested; Lepore met Dickens fans who came to the camp from far and wide. One regular attendee is the English actress Miriam Margolyes, who has acted in Dickens film adaptations, and who states that she first read “Oliver Twist” when she was eleven, and “Since then, there hasn’t been a day in my life when I haven’t read Dickens.” What a testimonial! Lepore’s article discusses Dickens' life, his family, his quirks, the history of his work, the value of his novels, and more; it is long, detailed, informative, and fascinating. I highly recommend it to readers who have any interest at all in Dickens. I have read most of Dickens’ novels, but I must admit it has been a long while since I read them; this article makes me want to go back and rediscover them.

Three Generations of Reading Women

My daughter M., whose demanding job keeps her working long hours, recently told me that it felt like such a luxury, almost a mini-vacation, to very occasionally take an hour or two to sit on the couch and read. She is currently reading and enjoying Jhumpa Lahiri’s “Unaccustomed Earth.” (Lahiri is one of my favorite current American authors as well.) In addition, my mother often tells me of how much she enjoys reading even more than in the past, now that she lives in a retirement home and has more time than ever before. I have written here (3/30/10) of how it gives me pleasure to select, gather and give my mom piles of books I think she will enjoy. She just finished, and absolutely loved, one of the books I gave her, Barbara Kingsolver’s “The Poisonwood Bible” (also a favorite of mine). She told me she got so involved in it that she would rush back to her apartment after meals to continue reading it. I know that feeling! And you all know -- since you are reading this blog -- how much I -- the middle generation -- love to read. I am currently re-re-reading (it is one of the novels I go back to over and over again) “Middlemarch,” which I will post about here soon. So I just flashed on this lovely mental picture of the three of us, three generations of women, each curled up on her respective couch or chair, eagerly and with pleasure reading our various novels, and then sharing with each other what we are reading and how we are feeling about those books. This vision makes me very happy!

Why Don't Boys Read More?

Are there “Girl Books and Boy Books?” as I asked when I wrote here on 4/22/10 about how some of my female and male students responded differently to a novel they read for my class? As I said then, the topic of whether and why females and males, on average, have overlapping but different tastes in books is too large and too fraught to summarize here. But I wondered about the gender question and books again recently when I read Robert Lipsyte’s essay, “The Lost Boys,” in the 8/21/11 New York Times Book Review. Lipsyte states that “boys’ aversion to reading, let alone to novels, has been worsening for years.” He discusses several possible reasons, but posits that one of the main ones is that most Y.A. (Young Adult) fiction is aimed toward girls. “At least three-quarters of the target audience [is] girls, and they [want] to read about mean girls, gossip girls, frenemies and vampires.” He goes on to say about current Y.A. titles that “books with story lines about disease, divorce, death and dysfunction [sell] better for girls than…for boys.” Whatever the reasons, it is unfortunate that boys read less than girls, and if publishing more high quality Y.A. titles that appeal to boys is the answer, or part of the answer, I hope that publishers will respond to Lipsyte’s essay by trying to do this.

Memorable Novels about War

Another in my "memorable" series: Memorable Novels about War

All Quiet on the Western Front, by Erich Maria Remarque
Catch-22, by Joseph Heller
The Charterhouse of Parma, by Stendhal
Dr. Zhivago, by Boris Pasternak
A Farewell to Arms, by Ernest Hemingway
For Whom the Bell Tolls, by Ernest Hemingway
From Here to Eternity, by James Jones
Johnny Got His Gun, by Dalton Trumbo
The Naked and the Dead, by Norman Mailer
Parade’s End, by Ford Madox Ford
The Red Badge of Courage, by Stephen Crane
Regeneration, by Pat Barker
Three Soldiers, by John Dos Passos
War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy

There have also been many novels about, or including material on, the aftereffects of war. To me, one of the most memorable of these is Virginia Woolf's "Mrs. Dalloway," in which the character Septimus Smith is a shell-shocked World War I veteran; his pain and suffering are visceral and powerfully portrayed by Woolf.

"One Day": The Film

A year ago, I posted a positive review of English writer David Nicholls’ novel “One Day” (8/16/10), a wonderful take on the theme of two friends who over the years sometimes veer into the territory of romance, but no matter what, always provide staunch support for each other through thick and thin. The suspense of the story is in wondering “will they or won’t they” get together as romantic partners, but there is so much more to the story. I recently saw the film version of “One Day.” Although the screenplay was written by the author, Nicholls, and stayed fairly close to the novel’s story, certain elements were left out or smoothed over, as is common in film versions. The result is that the movie is still absorbing, but less so than the novel. However, once again I got caught up in Emma’s and Dexter’s stories; it is fascinating to watch their lives develop over a period of twenty years. Each year we “check in” on them on July 15, St. Swithin’s Day. We watch their bright hopes for their futures, their stumbles, their confusions, their successes, their failures, their need for each other, their other romances, their relationships with their families, and the way they always lean on each other, and keep connecting and reconnecting. It is an absorbing observation of young adults growing and (unevenly!) maturing, trying to figure out this thing called grown-up life. We also learn much -- indirectly -- about British society, the class system in England, and gender roles. Jim Sturgess is wonderful as Emma; Anne Hathaway is appealing but less convincing as Emma; unfortunately, her struggles with the accent are a bit distracting. Patricia Clarkson is perfect, as always, as Dexter’s mother. Overall I recommend the film, even if it doesn’t quite live up to the novel.

"Enough about Love," by Herve Le Tellier

In the past few months, I have read, enjoyed, and posted here about several novels and memoirs set in France. The most recent is “Enough About Love” (Other Press, 2009, translation 2010), by Herve Le Tellier, translated from the French by Adriana Hunter. This novel is the story of two affairs and the complications that ensue among the four main characters and their families. It is all very modern and French (at least according to our American stereotypes about the French…). I enjoyed reading it, and found the characters well drawn. But it seems to me that there is something hollow at the core of the story, or perhaps of the characters. Although the novel is all about love and passion, it somehow seems that at least some of the characters are on some level playing an intellectual game, standing outside themselves and watching the game with great interest. This is particularly true of Anna, a psychoanalyst having an affair with Yves, a writer. Yves, by the way, ends by writing a book that sounds (intentionally) suspiciously like this book, the one sitting on my desk as I write. Very “meta.” The novel is structured a bit like classical farce; the reader can almost imagine a carefully choreographed dance, or stage play, with various characters entering and exiting through various stage doors. This impression is reinforced by the organization of the book, which consists of dozens of short chapters, each titled with the name or names of certain characters, such as “Thomas,” “Louise and Romain,” and “Anna and Yves.” Something that bothered me about the book, though: At the risk of sounding old-fashioned and prudish (which I don’t think I am), a part of me -- the emotional part, not the intellectual part -- feels that the novel doesn’t represent accurately, or enough, the problems, even devastation, brought about by affairs that threaten and sometimes destroy longtime marriages, especially when there are children. In this novel, the characters briefly talk about difficulties, and about feeling torn by the situation, but the problems don’t feel viscerally real. And the young children of the original marriages seem remarkably and -- it seems to me -- unrealistically unaffected by the affairs, even going on outings with and liking their mothers’ lovers. This novel offers many pleasures, including the Paris setting and the virtuoso writing. I am glad to have read it. But finally it seems to me a bit too much of an intellectual exercise that doesn’t truly engage the heart.