In Harley Granville-Barker’s 1910 play, “The Madras House,” a randy department-store tycoon scandalizes his family by “turning turk,” moving to Arabia and marrying multiple wives. It was absurd for him to endure society’s censure for showing interest in his shopgirls, he decided, when a man of his means could easily support a whole harem of young women. The fault, then, was not in himself but in society.
Barker satirizes nicely the tortured sort of logic to which some of his intellectual contemporaries in Britain resorted when explaining their own eccentric marriages. In “Uncommon Arrangements,” Katie Roiphe chronicles the romances, and rationalizations, of seven post-Victorian power couples who, she says, sought to modernize marriage, turning it into a more humane and equitable partnership — a goal that many today, of course, still strive for.
Yet a century ago these advocates for the equality of women and skeptics of conventional morality found their efforts as messy and frustrating as forward-thinking contemporary couples do. Ms. Roiphe is staunchly committed to feminism, but — to her credit — she seems compulsively interested in picking away at its contradictions. In particular, marital equity for these couples often seems indistinguishable from equal-opportunity philandering.