Lesley McDowell re-examines some of the twentieth century’s most famous literary love affairs.

“Cold deliberation” is not something we associate with the women writers of the twentieth century who hooked up with fellow novelists or poets or thinkers: Rebecca West, Katherine Mansfield, Jean Rhys, Simone de Beauvoir, Martha Gellhorn, as well as [Sylvia] Plath and [Elizabeth] Smart herself, all showed a degree of obsession in their liaisons with H. G. Wells, John Middleton Murry, Ford Madox Ford, Jean-Paul Sartre, Ernest Hemingway, [Ted] Hughes, and [George] Barker, respectively. Ranging in time from before the First World War (Mansfield and Murry) to the brink of Second Wave Feminism (Hughes and Plath), these relationships were characterized by passion both sexual (which is commonplace) and literary (which is rare and hard to resist).

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But it is those twentieth-century heterosexual relationships, charged by sexual passion and either flittering out when that passion dies or, in some cases, imploding with horrific consequences, that are the most complex, the most teasing, and ultimately the ones that intrigue us most. Above and beyond their work, West, Mansfield, Rhys, Beauvoir, Gellhorn, Plath, and Smart are famous for being essentially “victims of love.” At least four of them were deserted by their lovers or husbands (Mansfield escaped this fate by dying young and Beauvoir by participating in sexual games that she seems to have had little real interest in); West threatened suicide when Wells left her shortly after the beginning of their liaison and even wrote a short story, “At Valladolid,” about it; while Madox Ford’s rejection of Jean Rhys after eighteen months, according to one biographer, drove her further towards alcoholism. Plath, who might be called the poster girl for this group, and for abandoned women everywhere, did, of course, actually kill herself.

While the female half of the literary partnership tended to be less famous at the outset than her male counterpart—Barker was a flamboyant and hugely promising published poet when Smart began her pursuit, Hughes had a considerable reputation at Cambridge, and Wells was fast approaching the peak of his fame, as was Madox Ford—it is that female half who has posthumously either equalled or even exceeded her partner’s reputation. Quite a remarkable feat for these poor, lonely, abandoned “victims.”

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And yet—however bitter the break was when it came, however much it was regretted—would any of them have behaved differently? Would they have been lesser writers without the experience? The last word should go to Plath, who wrote in July 1958: “We are amazingly compatible. But I must be myself—make myself and not let myself be made by him.” Perhaps it was within these sexual and literary relationships, however brief, however long-lasting, that Plath and the other women writers mentioned here found that they could truly “make themselves.”