Recommendsday: Unhappy Marriages

It’s Wednesday again and it’s Easter Week. So for this week’s Recommendsday I did try and come up with something appropriate to the season. But I think I’ve already written about all the books with vicars and churches that I can think of pretty recently (although more are bound to come to me as soon as this post publishes, so you never know), so instead I’m back with a post about unhappy marriages in fiction – of various kinds. This post is entirely inspired by reading At Mrs Lippencote’s last week.

Elizabeth Taylor’s At Mrs Lippencote’s is set during the Second World War, when Julia joins her husband Roddy in a rented house near his RAF base. Their son Oliver is also with them as is Roddy’s cousin Eleanor. It is not a happy household. Julia and Roddy are not really well suited – he thought that she would grow and mature into her role as an officer’s wife under his guidance, while she thinks very little of the things that she is meant to do because of her “position”. They don’t spend a lot of time together, but what time they do spend together is mostly low-level unhappy as neither can ever do anything that will please the other. That makes it sound miserable – but it’s a social comedy, which I always enjoy. It was Taylor’s first novel – and although I like some of her others more, it’s definitely worth a look.

Julia has a husband problem – or does Roddy have a wife problem? – whichever way you call it, it’s an unhappy marriage and there are plenty of those around, particularly in novels set in the 1930s and 1940s. Whether it’s hurried marriages because people didn’t know each other well enough and there was a war coming (or happening) or marriages changed by war, there are plenty of options in books from the era.

In Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust Tony and Brenda Last have been married for a little under a decade, have an eight year old son and live in a country pile. He thinks they’re happy, but Brenda is bored and starts an affair – which sets Tony on the road that eventually leads to utter disaster. This gets pretty bleak (in ways I can’t explain because: spoilers) but it’s clever and from the tail end of Waugh’s satirical era, before he turned into his more realistic and also more religious novels.

There are plenty of unhappy marriages in Daphne Du Maurier too, you can basically take your pick because there’s almost always one miserable marriage in her novels somewhere. And if you pick Rebecca you can try and decide which Mrs De Winter has the worst marriage – the first or the second! But Frenchman’s Creek would also work and possibly doesn’t get as much notice and it has pirates (it’s set in the Restoration).

Jumping a couple of centuries forward in time not to Nora Ephron’s Heartburn. It’s the early 1980s, Rachel is very pregnant and has just discovered that her husband is in love with another woman. Across the course of the (very short) book, she cooks food (she’s a cookery writer), tries to win him back and rages against the world. If you’ve watched any of Ephron’s films you’ll recognise a few lines here and there from that. And it was inspired by the breakdown of Ephron’s own second marriage to the Washington Post journalist Carl Bernstein (of Watergate exposé fame).

There are of course plenty of unhappy marriages in mystery fiction – but given that often one of them ends up dead or doing murders it would be a bit of a spoiler to include them here. There are plenty of them in Agatha Christie’s books though, and Christie’s own disappearance and the breakdown in her first marriage has been extensively writen about. The Christie Affair by Nina Grammont was a BotW back in 2022 and is a reimagining of what happened when Christie went missing, written from the perspective of her husband’s mistress. It’s a hard one to write about without giving too much away – but I did try and give it ago in my review, so do check that out.