Separately, these three left a lasting mark on English letters, but together became English literature's most notorious threesome. Shelley fell deeply in love with Mary Godwin—but because he was married, the two would meet secretly at the grave of Mary's mother, Mary Wollstonecraft (the author of The Vindication of the Rights of Woman) at St. Pancras Churchyard. Much to her father's dismay, they married and ran off to France, leaving his pregnant wife behind. And Shelley would never renounce his philosophy of "free love." He and his friend Lord Byron proceeded to knock up practically every woman with a pulse, including Mary's stepsister, Claire. These indiscretions and their tragic ends are chronicled in Janet Todd's excellent feminist history Death and the Maidens: Fanny Wollstonecraft and the Shelley Circle. Soon Byron, Shelley, and Mary would find themselves in front of a fireplace (hopefully en flagrant) betting on who could write the best scary story. Mary won.
In their youth, Hawthorne and Peabody were both invalids. Hawthorne spent most of his childhood recovering from a nasty leg-fracture, reading books on the floor of his library, and Sophia suffered from some unknown ailment that kept her bedridden. The story goes, however, when Hawthorne would come to visit her, she would perk up and he would sit by her bedside for hours, talking away. A talented artist, she would give him paintings or sketches she had done. One day when he suggested they walk to town, she got out of her bed for the first time in years. On their wedding day, they inscribed a note to commemorate the occasion on the window using Sophia's wedding ring: "Man's accidents are God's purposes. Sophia A. Hawthorne 1843. Nath Hawthorne This is his study. The smallest twig leans clear against the sky. Composed by my wife and written with her diamond. Inscribed by my husband at sunset, April 3, 1843. In the Gold light." Their letters are devastatingly romantic. Megan Marshall's book, The Peabody Sisters, recounts their romance and illuminates Sophia's contribution to Romanticism through her influence on Hawthorne.
When Lawrence met his future wife and muse, she was married with three children, which didn't stop them from eloping and spending the rest of their lives together. Their relationship is characterized as passionate but tenuous in Michael Squires' D.H. Lawrence and Frieda. She could be controlling, and there were rumors of affairs on both sides. Their friend Katherine Mansfield, wrote about their relationship: "I don't know which disgusts one worse—when they are loving and playing with each other, or when they are roaring at each other and he is pulling out Frieda's hair and saying 'I'll cut your bloody throat, you bitch.'" Ultimately Frieda stood by Lawrence, nursed him in his poor health, and helped to inspire the characters of Gudrun in Women in Love, and, of course, the infamous Lady Chatterley. In March 1912, he wrote to her, "You are the most wonderful woman in all of England."
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An uppercrust par excellence couple, Vita (daughter of the 3rd Baron Sackville) and Harold (an eventual MP) married in 1913 out of love for one another, although both would carry out intense love affairs with members of the same sex during their marriage. Vita's most famous conquest was Virginia Woolf, who would write Orlando for her. Harold was more subtle in his choice of escorts. Regardless, Harold wrote to Vita, "For each of us the magnetic north is each other. If you were to die, I would kill myself." Though they were separated for almost 10 years while Harold worked in the East, they wrote to each other every single day. When he returned, they had two sons and lived at Sissinghurst Castle. There they grew one of the most famous English gardens of all time. Their compelling biography, A Portrait of a Marriage, written by their son Nigel, is a deeply moving book, not to be missed.
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Throughout her life, Elizabeth Bishop kept mum on her sexuality and personal life, unlike her friend Robert Lowell, who frequently made use of his in his poetry. After moving to Brazil in 1956, mostly to escape her dependence on alcohol, Bishop won the Pulitzer Prize. She then met Lota de Macedo Soares, a socialite and architect. They lived together for 15 years, most of which were difficult, due to bouts of depression on Lota's part and Bishop's tendency to self-medicate with booze. Only one love letter from Bishop to Lota survives, but Bishop would later write "I was very happy with her—happier than I have ever been in my life—for about 14 years." Eventually Bishop left Lota for another woman and returned to the United States, and Lota followed her, to commit suicide in her hotel room the day she arrived. When Bishop returned to Brazil to handle Lota's affairs, she found that her family and friends had destroyed all their belongings and their letters. Michael Sledge's new novel, The More I Owe You, tells of their tumultuous relationship.
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Martha Gellhorn was an accomplished war journalist who reported on every major conflict that occurred during her adult life. Her memoir, Travels With Myself and Another, recounts her incredible adventures. She met Ernest Hemingway in 1936 and they traveled to Spain to cover the Spanish American War. He supposedly fell for her after she displayed great courage in dodging an exploding shell. During their four years together, Gellhorn continued to travel all over the world for her job, prompting Hemingway to write, "Are you a war correspondent, or a wife in my bed?" She dumped him shortly after returning from wartime England. Later, Gellhorn would say she never had any intention of "being a footnote in someone else's life," and insisted that Hemingway's name not be mentioned during interviews.
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Perhaps the most famous (and written about) literary relationship of all time, there are countless books that research the connection between Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. Diane Middlebrook's Her Husband, however, is the first in imagining what it was like for Hughes to be Plath's husband both in life and after her suicide. Middlebrook does a fantastic job of describing how close the two poets were during their marriage, relying on each other for criticism and inspiration, a refreshing take on a partnership that's consistently judged as a complete disaster. In her journal, Plath writes about how much she loves Hughes, even the way he smells: "The delicious transference of my obsession with Ted's delicious fragrances which to me are lovelier than any field of new cut grasses?" Their fallout, however, was the worst. After Plath discovered Hughes was having an affair when the adulteress called the house, she ripped the phone from the wall and tore his Oxford Shakespeare to shreds. She burned the second novel she was working on, and moved out. In a devastating twist of fate, the woman Hughes had cheated on Plath with, Assia Wevill, would commit a copycat suicide six years later, gassing herself and their daughter in the kitchen.
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Although Norman Mailer had tried to kill his second wife with a penknife at a party, Norris Church, a 26-year-old single mom from Arkansas, still went for him and became his sixth and last wife. She would write him sweet little poems: "You were there / and I was there / in a pocket / of sunshine / in a vacuum of space." In her memoir, A Ticket to the Circus, Church writes that Mailer was constantly unfaithful to her, and she considered leaving him—"why had I been so consumed by this old, fat, bombastic, lying little dynamo?" But as stepmother to his eight children and with a child of their own, she felt their family was reason to stay. "I had been around town long enough to know the guys who were available, and I thought: Is there somebody else I want to make a life with? Is there someone else I want to be the father of my children? I couldn't think of one single person. If I had, maybe I would have taken that step." Plus, as she said in a recent New York Times interview, "The sex was always great. That was the glue that held all this mess together, or the honey."
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