Writers as lousy lovers

Between the Sheets: The Literary Liaisons of Nine 20th-Century Women Writers

In 2005, McDowell, at the time a fledgling fiction writer, began a one-year relationship with a published writer, a man who was just emerging from a marriage with two young kids and with “little interest in committing himself to one person.” McDowell’s shoddy treatment in the relationship, which ended with her being dumped for another woman, didn’t dilute her attraction to him. It was the delight she took in their exchanges about literature, and his editing and encouragement of her literary efforts, that compelled her to him.

This is also, she says, what drew so many of her subjects, including Katherine Mansfield, Anaïs Nin and Simone de Beauvoir, to their literary partners. They chose their fates knowingly, in a kind of Faustian pact that would benefit their art. They weren’t victims, she says, though they were treated ghastly, partly explicable (if not excusable) by the fact that they lived in a pre-feminist age.