Not many novelists have managed to write well about these unglamorous but subtle dramas. From George Eliot to John Updike, here are some who have

Barry Hines once told me that the novel he’d just finished reading was so good that he felt it was pointless to carry on writing his own. We had to agree to disagree. When I read something brilliant, it makes me itch to write. There are three truly great novels about long marriages that I have waited decades to engage with in writing. (Which is not to say that I imagine myself at their level, but, as the old saying goes, a cat may look at a king.)

Those novels are: The Tree of Man by Patrick White, The Rainbow by DH Lawrence and John Updike’s Rabbit novels. All three follow a marriage from beginning to end so minutely that the reader sees with new eyes the shifts and fascinating complexities within that age-old relationship, usually regarded as so dull that it only appears as a backdrop to other people’s interesting infidelities.



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In Conrad and Eleanor, I wanted to write about a long marriage and the balance of power between two equally matched partners. I wanted to explore the ways in which memories can shift in light of later events, and the ways in which love can turn to hate and back to love again. I was interested in giving equal space to both partners’ voices and I was keen to explore the fallout from reversed gender roles in a marriage where there are children.

I chose “marriages” rather than “relationships” for this list because I am fascinated by the baggage that marriage carries. It is a template for living together and procreating that has been implanted in us by the Bible, by history, by literature, by custom. We still subscribe to the fairytale of it – all those white weddings – and give it tax breaks. It is not sexuality-specific; lesbians and gays subscribe to it as enthusiastically as heterosexuals. Most of us hunger for monogamy, even as we yearn for its opposite.

And that’s the subject of these 10 books: how does a couple live together, over years, over decades? What does each understand of the other; what do they gain, what do they lose? What is a long marriage, and how on earth do people do it? In the parts that therapy and Relate cannot reach – in the body and the heart and the imagination, what is this ideal so many of us feel we must live? Surely only fiction can tell.

1. The Tree of Man by Patrick White (1956)

Young Stan Parker clears a patch of Australian bush and builds a log house. Over time, he brings along bits of furniture and crockery on his horse and cart, and eventually he brings his new wife Amy. They are as innocent and isolated as Adam and Eve. Over time, people build on neighbouring plots. Children are born, the bush is ravaged by fire and a neighbour murders her brother. Stan and Amy both hope for revelation and meaning in their lives. The constant to-ing and fro-ing of their (often mistaken) understanding of one another is held steadily in focus.

2. The Rainbow by DH Lawrence (1915)

A Nottinghamshire farmer falls in love with a Polish widow, and marries her. She already has a daughter, and they go on to have two more. The novel spans 30 years. Like Patrick White, Lawrence uses free indirect style to fully reveal his characters’ thoughts, but what is more extraordinary is how he manages to convey tectonic shifts of emotion, of distance and closeness, that neither character can articulate.



3. Rabbit, Run by John Updike (1960)

I’m really recommending four books here. The three that follow are Rabbit Redux, Rabbit is Rich, and Rabbit at Rest, which together span the lives and lifelong marriage of Janice and Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom. For much of Rabbit, Run, Updike puts Harry centre stage and restricts the novel to his point of view, chronicling his edgy hunger for freedom and sex, his affair with buxom Ruth, his frustration with his job and his dozy alcoholic wife. So when the novel switches to Janice’s point of view – hurt, betrayed, drunk and utterly incapable of looking after a baby daughter – the effect is electrifying. Janice’s character gains strength as the novels progress, and this blackly comic version of marriage is as eye-opening and sexy and convincing as any I have read.

4. Middlemarch by George Eliot (1871-2)

This great classic contains an impressive variety of long marriages, each finely drawn and in contrast to its fellows. There’s Lydgate, with his idealism and adoration of Rosamond’s beauty, who is brought up short against her simple selfishness; Dorothea, whose self-sacrificing devotion runs aground on the shallows of Casaubon’s self-importance; ruined Bulstrode with his loyal wife; practical Celia and generous Sir James, and sensible Mary Garth with feckless Fred Vincy. Eliot plays with the idea of marriage, the illusions that initiate it, the deceptions and self-deceptions that damage it, the humour and loyalty and selflessness that enable it to survive.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Self-importance and self-sacrifice Jamie Newall (Casaubon) and Georgina Strawson (Dorothea) in Dorothea’s Story from in The Middlemarch Trilogy at the Orange Tree Theatre in 2013. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

5. A Spool of Blue Thread by Anne Tyler (2015)

Tyler often writes about marriage, and always writes true. The first 10 pages of this novel are almost entirely dialogue and reveal Abby and Red Whitshank brilliantly. They are arguing helplessly over how to handle a phone call from their son Denny announcing he is gay. Abby theorises that his getting a girl into trouble while he was still at school might have been a symptom of homosexuality. Red asks, “Come again?” “We can never know with absolute certainty what another person’s sex life is like.” “No, thank God.” Their love for one another is as comfortable and worn as the old slippers and colourless dressing gown each wears.



6. Ghana Must Go by Taiye Selasi (2013)

This is not really about a long marriage, because Kweku abandons his family in the US after being pressurised into conducting surgery on a dying woman. He is unjustly blamed for her death and can’t bring himself to tell his wife. He vanishes. They move back to different destinations in west Africa and their children scatter; they never meet again. Yet they are always present in one another’s lives. A romantic, enduringly loving version of marriage, that is paradoxically (inevitably?) only sustained through absence.

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7. The Children Act by Ian McEwan (2014)

McEwan very cleverly reveals just how much the turmoil in Fiona’s marriage is affecting her work as a high court judge. The economy and precision of the writing enable us to glimpse quite vividly her husband’s side of the story, and indeed the whole history of their 35-year-old marriage.

8. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf (1927)

One of the novel’s many strands, and the one that first fascinated me as a young feminist, is the way it contrasts the complexity of Mrs Ramsay’s married life with the single life of artist Lily Briscoe. The long marriage itself is not precisely the subject of Woolf’s great novel, but the question of what a marriage might give and what it might take away from a woman is a key component.

9. Things My Mother Never Told Me by Blake Morrison (2002)

This is biography: the story of Morrison’s mother’s life, revealing all she gave up for her marriage (her Irish family background, her Catholicism, her work as a hospital doctor) and how she reinvented herself for a man whom many might call domineering and who went on to be unfaithful to her. And yet it was a long, solid marriage. Towards the end of it she told her son, “I’ve had a good life.” A fine exploration of the complexity and conundrums of marriage.

10. East Coker from Four Quartets by TS Eliot (1943)

I will leave you with a poem. Eliot incorporates a quote from The Boke named the Governour, 1531, by his ancestor Sir Thomas Elyot, in a passage which beautifully encapsulates marriage as ritual and as nature:

… if you do not come too close, On a summer midnight, you can hear the music Of the weak pipe and the little drum And see them dancing around the bonfire The association of man and woman In daunsinge, signifying matrimonie – A dignified and commodious sacrament. Two and two, necessarye coniunction, Holding eche other by the hand or the arm Which betokeneth concorde. Round and round the fire Leaping through the flames, or joined in circles … Keeping time, Keeping the rhythm in their dancing As in their living in the living seasons ... The time of the coupling of man and woman And that of beasts.

I’d be very interested to hear readers’ recommendations of other books on this topic.

• Conrad and Eleanor by Jane Rogers is published by Atlantic, priced £12.99, and is available from the Guardian bookshop for £10.39.