Profiles of the unconventional

A quarter century ago, Phyllis Rose published her strikingly original “Parallel Lives,” which rethought the Victorian age’s unconventional marriages and menages -- so far removed from the staid image usually associated with that era.

By looking at such literary couples as Thomas Carlyle and Jane Welsh, John Ruskin and Effie Gray, and John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor as well as the fraught triangle of Charles and Catherine Dickens and Ellen Ternan, Rose shone a much-needed spotlight on the unconventional side of 19th century British life.

Katie Roiphe pays explicit tribute to “Parallel Lives,” and in many ways her new book, “Uncommon Arrangements,” is an attempt to do for British literary life in the first half of the 20th century what Rose had done for the preceding age.

Well written, thoughtful, measured, though less groundbreaking than “Parallel Lives,” it lacks the earlier book’s irritating tone that at times could border on the insufferable as it sent forth its undeniably fresh apercus.

Roiphe has spread her net wide in selecting the seven matches she has chosen to analyze. Some relationships, such as those between H.G. Wells and Rebecca West and among David Garnett, Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell have been well explored.

The others, between Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murry; Elizabeth von Arnim and Francis, 2nd Earl Russell (Bertrand’s older brother); Radclyffe Hall and Una, Lady Troubridge; Philip and Lady Ottoline Morrell; and among Vera Brittain, Gordon Catlin and Winifred Holtby, will be less familiar to most readers.

But it is a tribute to Roiphe’s artistry that her portraits are equally valuable whether she is on well-trodden ground or not.

Those who are unfamiliar with the stories she tells will find her lively, perceptive accounts appealing, and many will want to read more about these people, something they will find easy to do because Roiphe helpfully appends an annotated bibliography to each chapter.

Even those who have familiarity with the characters who populate this book will not be wasting their time being taken through the stories again.

Never didactic, Roiphe is a sensitive, insightful interpreter of her subjects, and her take on them is well worth having, especially in view of her knowledge and understanding of the milieus in which they acted out their personal dramas.

Only occasionally does she slip, as when she has Lytton Strachey bringing flowers and books to Lady Morrell’s deathbed in 1938: That would have been quite a trick on his part and might even have made her sit up, since he had been dead for more than six years by then.

The seven “Uncommon Arrangements” are indeed very different from one another -- one factor that makes this book such fascinating and diverting reading -- but some of Roiphe’s right-on comments about one relationship apply marvelously well to many if not all of the others.

Writing of Wells and West as they approached the crisis point in their 10-year-long affair, Roiphe says, “They found each other maddening, compelling, brilliant, difficult, attractive, and neither was able to break the dark, magnetic force field between them.” These adjectives and this dynamic fit many of the people in this book.

The unconventionality of the characters here is appealing because it is so natural to them. Whatever else they are, they are not poseurs.

One of Bell’s earlier lovers, the distinguished art historian Roger Fry, “who had been heartbroken,” Roiphe writes, “when his own affair with Vanessa ended, remained among Vanessa’s most intimate friends. He wrote of her elaborate, shifting menage: ‘It really is an almost ideal family based as it is on adultery and mutual forbearance with Clive [Bell] the deceived husband and me the abandoned lover. It really is rather a triumph of reasonableness over the conventions.’ ”

These people really did have family values, but they were decidedly not the common variety adopted by most of society. Whether they were the lesbian couple of Hall and Troubridge or Brittain’s odd balancing act of a “semi-detached marriage” to Catlin with an intense emotional, although apparently not overtly sexual, relationship with Holtby, these folk were reinventing the rules governing unions in a new century and age.

Admiring as she is of so much that is brave and fine in these relationships, Roiphe is careful to note the cost in human terms to participants and also to those enmeshed in these complicated dynamics through no fault of their own.

Examples of the latter are the bitter illegitimate son of Wells and West, Anthony West, and the damaged Angelica, who realized only later in life the hurtful contrarieties involved in being the legal child of Clive Bell, the daughter of Vanessa Bell and her lover Duncan Grant, and the wife of Grant’s own onetime lover, David Garnett!

But Roiphe does not focus only on such flamboyant, obvious cases. Writing of Grant, she opines with characteristic perspicacity that he was “one of those people who do not perceive things that are not convenient for them to perceive.”

It’s another of those recurring destructive little worms in the apples of these uncommon people’s arrangements that recur again and again in the course of these ever-enthralling and occasionally chilling tales.

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Martin Rubin is a critic and the author of “Sarah Gertrude Millin: A South African Life.”