Books like Pete and Alice in Maine

Who washed the socks and boiled the eggs for the so-called Lake Poets? Or any poet, for that matter? The answer is almost certainly their sisters, wives and daughters. 

This is an account of the gifted, long-suffering, often tormented, coterie of women who laboured in the shadow of Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey. Connected by blood as well as marriage, the women were very different, but each was as trapped as the other by their gender.

The emotional fallout resulted in illnesses, neurosis, and deep unhappiness. Like her father, Sara Coleridge was an opium addict. Dorothy Wordsworth was consumed by love for her brother, and Emily Southey was a depressive.

I was very struck by the struggles to gain expression and to be treated as intellectual equals. Their stories made me determined never to be hampered from writing my own. I thought of those women as I wrote one of my… show more.

I'm a huge fan of contemporary romance, but I also love it when a little element of magical realism steps in to churn up the plot, and that's exactly what happens in this book.

Georgie and Neal love each other, but is that enough, or could their relationship be over? Then, through an old yellow landline telephone, Georgie connects to Neal in the past. Now she has a chance to change everything–or realize why she fell in love in the first place. I found this story memorable and moving, as well as loads of fun!

This was my first Freida McFadden book, and I was drawn in from the start and though I wasn’t sure how I felt about the narrator (the maid) or the husband and wife who hired her; I love a main character who makes me cringe and that she was the housekeeper privy to the owners’ secrets kept me guessing.

The prologue set me up for an ending that I never saw coming. Is she a housemaid or something else? I read this in one sitting!

This book was published years after mine, but I wish it had been around when I was going through my life upheaval. The author writes about relationships and has an intelligent and thoughtful take on marriage. You might not agree with her philosophy, but her book is eye-opening, will challenge your assumptions, and shares information that might help people as they rebuild their lives after widowhood, infidelity, and divorce.

This novel, by Meg Wolitzer, offers such a twist at the end, I’m not sure how to write about it as an example of a woman writer finding her voice without giving too much away.
The Wife is the story of a Noble Prize-winning author, Joe Castelman, and his wife, Joan, who have kept a terrible secret for all the years of their marriage. Because you know the topic of my selections here, you can surmise that Joan is also a writer, though she hides that fact. Her character tells the story, and we only slowly see the facets of their strange and deceptive marriage. It becomes clear that Joan is a very good writer indeed, and she’s tired of keeping her secret.

This clever tale will make you think about what it means to invent a life both on and off the page. And that there’s no stopping a… show more.

The subtitle of the book helps you understand Gary Thomas’s purpose: he wants to help his readers see that marriage is not primarily for our happiness.

Although it is a gift and frequently fills us with joy, marriage is also very sanctifying, which is to say it makes us holy. Few things in life help us grow spiritually as much as marriage. When we get married we learn to be patient, gentle, and we frequently have to find ourselves being forgiving. And these are all wonderful graces.

I love the way in which this fascinating group biography of the female partners of renowned male writers brings these usually ignored figures into the limelight.

Ciuraru argues that behind the careers of many acclaimed literary figures stand the important contributions of their wives. These women offered intellectual as well as practical support. 

Many of these literary wives shelved their own creative aspirations to tend to the careers of their husbands.

But after their husbands’ deaths, some of these women found they finally had space for their own literary lives to start blossoming. 

Anyone who reads one Peter Cameron book will read them all. In his latest novel, a married couple ends up at a grand hotel in a strange European country of fading glory, amid guests who are both eccentric and troubling. At times it’s hard to know whether what is happening is really happening; at times it’s all too acid and real. I hesitate to call this book a comedy, because it’s unsettling. But it’s also magical and memorable, and you won’t want to check out and depart its pages.

This is the 75th anniversary edition of a book first published in 1946, a best-seller at the time, and the impetus for changes in the treatment of psychiatric patients. The narrator, novelist Victoria Cunningham, finds herself incarcerated in a corrupt and badly-run hospital with little memory of how she got there; I was disturbed by the way she had to navigate through an obscure, nonsensical bureaucracy that seems more insane than any of the hospital’s patients. Virginia is supported by her loving and loyal husband, but at times she loses track of her memories and forgets who he is. The book is frightening—especially given that it’s based on the author’s own experiences at Bellevue Hospital in New York—but also intimate and moving.

Paris in the 1920s and Hemingway—what more could I want?

I'll admit I'm not a devoted fan of Hemingway's prose, but I've always been captivated by the man himself, and this novel more than satisfied that fascination. What unfolds is a love story as beautiful as it is devastating: Hemingway and his first wife, Hadley, set against the glittering, restless backdrop of 1920s Paris.

The author's prose is quietly stunning, and her historical rendering of the era feels fully alive. But it's Hadley who stayed with me. Watching her fight to hold her marriage together, to hold him together, is at times almost unbearable. She's drawn with such sympathy and complexity: a woman of real intelligence and grace, loving someone who was always partly beyond reach.