Examines a range of Victorian and modernist life writing on intimate relationships, including well-known literary couples such as the Woolfs, Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath and Christopher Isherwood and Don Bacardy.

Exposing how modernist and late-modernist writers tell the stories of their intimate relationships though life writing, this book engages with the process by which these authors become subjects to a significant other, a change that subsequently becomes narrative within their works. Looking specifically at partners in a couple, Janine Utell focuses on such literary pairings as Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Valentine Ackland, Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy, and Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. Utell draws on the latest work in narrative theory and the study of intimacy and affects to shed light on the ethics of reading relationships in the modern period. Focusing on a range of genres and media, from memoir through documentary film to comics, this book demonstrates that stories are essential for our thinking of love, desire and sexuality.

"This lively monograph by Janine Utell … contributes to Woolf studies, modernist studies, and life-writing studies, a scholarly field that treats such texts as diaries, letters, and memoirs in limning how writing and thinking help people to cultivate their individual and shared lives." - Woolf Studies Annual

"Literary Couples and Twentieth-Century Life Writing is an interesting and imaginative book on collaboration, mutuality, and narrative intimacy. Utell may prefer rainbow to granite, but this work nonetheless lays solid foundations for future scholarship on literary love and life writing." - Life Writing