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BIOGRAPHY:Between the Sheets: The Famous Literary Liaisons of Nine 20th-Century Women WritersBy Lesley McDowell Duckworth, Overlook, 352pp. £16.99

BETWEEN THE SHEETStackles the perennial problem for biographers of writers with difficult private lives, which is how to reconcile the work and the life. The women writers whom Lesley McDowell addresses all had difficult lives, particularly in terms of their relationships. The nine examined here – Katherine Mansfield, HD, Rebecca West, Jean Rhys, Anaïs Nin, Simone de Beauvoir, Martha Gellhorn, Elizabeth Smart and Sylvia Plath – are all notable for their literary achievements. Their associations with men, however, are notoriously less successful, and are often read by critics as destructive at worst, futile at best. McDowell attempts to counter this impression, declaring that these writers made a “Faustian pact” to put up with emotionally destructive relationships because at the same time they were artistically productive liaisons. “In exchange for what benefited their art, they took on board certain behaviours, attitudes, or treatment from their male partners, the kind they very likely wouldn’t have stood from anyone else.”