This book has one of the most off-putting jackets of recent memory. Elizabeth Jane Howard, glass in hand, is gazing attentively at her celebrated novelist husband Kingsley Amis, who is beaming with self-congratulatory pleasure at someone out of shot. Howard, no mean writer herself, seems to be performing the good wife’s duty of smiling at a joke she has heard at least ten times. It is a photo that invites the reader to buckle up for five essays about the wives of prominent writers who gave up their own ambitions for the greater good of being ‘handmaidens to genius’.

Lives of the Wives is a little more nuanced than this. In setting out to document marriages of varying ghastliness between writers, Ciuraru was smart enough not to be bogged in the familiar thickets of Ted-and-Sylvia, Vera-and-Vladimir. She does not reject the usual suspects, however: apart from Howard and Amis, she deals with Kenneth Tynan and Elaine Dundy, as well as Roald Dahl and Patricia Neal. But the addition of less well-known couples – Elsa Morante/Alberto Moravia and Una Troubridge/Radclyffe Hall – is refreshing.