A review by crowyhead
Uncommon Arrangements: Seven Portraits of Married Life in London Literary Circles 1910-1939 by Katie Roiphe

3.0

This is about the experiments that members of the Bloomsbury group and other eminent writers and artists undertook in their personal lives, comitted as many of them were to creating new ways of looking at love, marriage, and friendship. The subject matter is highly interesting, but Roiphe's writing is frequently very pedestrian; at times, I felt that I was reading someone's senior thesis. Roiphe has done a great service by bringing together so much information from diaries, letters, and literature in order to cast light on these relationships, but I do wish she was a better prose stylist. The book ends up being interesting in spite of her failings as a writer -- but I do wonder what a better writer might have accomplished with the material.