The Marriage Club by Kate Legge

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Genre - Fiction


“They could be madly in love. You just don’t know. You never do.” Leith Kremmer and her best friend Eva agree that you can never tell what is really going on in other people’s marriages. Even when you are close friends and have shared years of gossip and personal confessions you can still never know. When Leith’s book club meets in her comfortable home to discuss Ted Hughes’ “Birthday Letters”, they enjoy a night of champagne and an elaborate Spanish supper. They laugh hysterically at the sound of her husband George, an eminent family court judge, practicing his golf swing in the upstairs den. No one suspects that Leith has come to a momentous decision and is preparing to leave her marriage and change her life. No one is prepared for her sudden death and the questions that it raises about her marriage and the secrets she has kept from them all. This is an absorbing story about marriage and society that will appeal to women of all ages.

---- Sue, Knox

Lady Worsley's whim by Hallie Rubenhold

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Genre - Non Fiction


This story of an 18th century marriage is a cautionary tales about sex, scandal & divorce. Seymour Fleming was only eighteen when she married Richard Worsley. It was a marriage of convenience, & after the birth of a son & heir, Richard neglected his young wife, who ran wild with her friends & behaved indiscreetly with a number of young men. When Seymour fell in love with George Bisset, a friend of her husband, Richard seemed happy to accommodate the relationship & all three lived together. When the lovers eloped, however, Richard Worsley took his revenge. He sued his wife’s lover for criminal conversation, a legal way of separating from his wife without actually divorcing her & allowing her to remarry. The trial transfixed society, the newspapers & cartoonists of the day reporting on every scandalous detail. Neither party came out of the trial with their reputations intact. Richard escaped the gossip by travelling in Europe & Seymour dropped out of society altogether. This is a sad story of two young people hurried into marriage & suffering the consequences of incompatibility. Rubenhold has done a wonderful job piecing it together from contemporary documents & newspapers.

---- Reviewed by Lyn, Headquarters

Uncommon arrangements by Katie Roiphe

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Genre - Non Fiction


This is a portrait of seven married couples living in London between the wars. Some of the couples, like Katherine Mansfield & John Middleton Murry, and Vanessa & Clive Bell, are still well known. Others, like Vera Brittain & Gordon Catlin are less so. Roiphe is interested in these unconventional couples who tried to negotiate new ways of living. Mansfield & Murry were often separated because she needed to travel to warm climates for her health. Brittain & Catlin had a semi-detached marriage because Brittain wanted to continue working as a writer & journalist while Catlin was an academic in the US. The Bells were at the heart of the Bloomsbury group & had a famously open marriage with Charleston becoming home to Vanessa’s lover, Duncan Grant, & his lover, Bunny Garnett. An interesting look at life, love & marriage.

---- Reviewed by Lyn, Headquarters

Alfred & Emily by Doris Lessing

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This is an interesting mix of fiction & non fiction. The first half is a fictional idea of what the lives of Lessing's parents (the Alfred & Emily of the title) could have been like if they hadn't married, and if WWI hadn’t disrupted their lives. They meet, but marry other people and are fulfilled in different ways. Lessing feels that WWI blighted their lives, and had an effect on her own life as well. “That war, the Great War…squatted over my childhood…And here I still am, trying to get out from under that monstrous legacy, trying to get free.” Her father lost his leg & met her mother when she was nursing at the Royal Free Hospital. They emigrated to Rhodesia, but it wasn't a great success. Alfred really wanted to be an English farmer in Surrey & Emily's great love was killed in the war, and her life after that was really only second best & full of regrets. The second half of the book is a memoir of Alfred & Emily’s real lives. Lessing has written about her African childhood before, in her autobiographies & the Martha Quest series of novels. Here, though, she focuses more on her parents’ experiences of struggle & hardship, & the result is a moving account of two people who could have been happier if world events had left them untouched.

---- Reviewed by Lyn, Headquarters