Marriage

Medieval women – they were ‘just like us’. Except that they weren’t. Poet, Mystic, Widow, Wife is the first popular book by the academic and New Generation thinker Hetta Howes. It is a history of medieval women in relation to four celebrated figures – Marie de France (poet), Julian of Norwich (mystic), Christine de Pizan (widow) and Margery Kempe (wife) – whose lives have been retold recently in excellent studies by Anthony Bale, Marion Turner and Janina Ramirez. Howes’s book is highly readable and informative, placing the works of this quartet within a broad range of cultural documents – treatises, guidebooks, wills, court records and folklore. There are some great

Lower Than the Angels (that is the condition of man, according to the psalmist and St Paul) is a book that combines the two most fascinating subjects, religion and sex – but you do have to take both bits of the agenda. This is Christian history with an eye to marriage, sexual acts, sexuality, celibacy, feminism and gender. Diarmaid MacCulloch is primarily a historian of the Reformation but, as his A History of Christianity (2009) demonstrates, he’s up for the bigger picture. This history takes us from early Jewish concepts of God and sex (I was startled to find the God of Abraham was once assigned a spouse, Asherah) right

Charlotte Mendelson has been described in the Times as a ‘master at family drama’, and her previous novel, The Exhibitionist (2022), contained in Ray Hanrahan one of the most odious fictional husbands ever. Mendelson clearly has an appetite as well as talent for writing awful spouses. In her latest novel, Wife, Penny Cartwright is if anything even worse. This is the story of a lesbian relationship that sours. The book begins at the marriage’s end, but in its slightly confusing structure it leaps back to the beginning and then forward again. In fairness, these time- jumps are clearly signalled and I think the sense of bewilderment they nonetheless create is

Contemporary Irish writers have a knack of making their recent past feel very foreign. Clare Keegan’s Small Things Like These is set in 1985, but the horrors she reveals about one of Ireland’s Magdalene laundries seem more like ancient history. Alan Murrin pulls off something similar in The Coast Road, where in late 1994 divorce is still illegal in Ireland, unlike the rest of Europe. Izzy Keaveney, a housewife with two teenage children, ‘has the depression’ and has dragged herself to Sunday morning mass despite a hangover. She spent the previous evening at a dinner-dance, listening to her politician husband James give a talk about the importance of business in

In Splinters, the American novelist and essayist Leslie Jamison leaves behind the issue of her addiction and recovery – the subject of her previous memoir, The Recovering (2018) – and takes us through her pregnancy, experience of childbirth, marriage, divorce and post-separation dating life. Each stage of her journey is related with the author’s trademark love of the telling detail: On the postpartum ward my window ledge filled up with snacks from friends: graham crackers, cashews, cheddar cheese, coconut water, oranges with tiny green leaves. Someone hands her a form to fill out. ‘Did I want bone broth?’ We can assume she does, as bone broth appears later on. Much

In her disillusioned later years Thomas Hardy’s first wife, Emma, bitterly reflected: ‘He understands only the women he invents – the others not at all.’ In Hardy Women, Paula Byrne sets out to recover the stories of the women in his life ‘who did not have a voice and who were often deliberately omitted from Hardy’s self-ghosted autobiography’, in order to reveal that ‘the magnificent fictional women he invented would not have been possible without the hardship and hardiness of the real ones who shaped his passions and his imagination’. She has not come up with anything that radically changes what we already know of Hardy’s background and what he

New books by, articles about or Sasquatch-like sightings of J.M. Coetzee routinely send me back to that infamous YouTube clip of Geoff Dyer face-planting while being introduced by Coetzee at the Adelaide Book Festival – an episode often cited as evidence that the Nobel Laureate has no sense of humour. The garlanded ex-South African’s work is famously as dry as the Karoo, and Coetzee himself has been accused of having only ever laughed once. But a smile is visible in ‘The Pole’, the longest story in this collection. Beatriz, in her late forties, is an educated Spanish woman, ‘a good person’ in a ‘civilised’ (read dormant) marriage, involved in organising

‘To begin at the beginning,’ intones Richard Burton with a voice like warm treacle at the start of the 1971 film Under Milk Wood. It’s hard to imagine an actor more obviously influenced by his own beginnings. The epigraph to this double biography is ‘The damp, dark prison of eternal love’, a line borrowed from Quentin Crisp. And if that’s an accurate assessment of Burton’s on-off-on-again relationship with the actress Elizabeth Taylor, it’s an even better summary of his childhood in Wales. Born Richard Walter Jenkins to a barmaid mother and a coal miner father (a ‘12-pints-a-day man’ who sometimes disappeared for weeks on end to drink and gamble), as