For better or worse

Margaret Foster's new book is a gentle enquiry into the conditions of being a wife, using three historical subjects as examples, interspersed with autobiographical reflections about her own happy 40-year marriage to journalist and writer Hunter Davies. Forster's novels and memoirs are all about family relationships, the hard lot of women, the demands of men: here she goes over the same territory in a more analytical spirit.

As representatives of wifedom, the three subjects seem arbitrarily picked. Mary Moffat, wife of pioneering missionary-cumexplorer David Livingstone, was a safe choice to share her husband's demanding and difficult life. Plain, unobtrusive and uncomplaining (Mary came from a missionary family) she could be relied on to function without fuss and accompanied Livingstone on a series of dangerous African postings, coping with pregnancies, hardship and disease in the spirit of Christian endurance. What Mary thought about this, or anything, is hard to guess; her only forms of self expression were a capacity for surliness and occasional recourse to the bottle.

At some point she seems to have developed a profound scepticism about the religion she was toting around the Dark Continent, but it

never stopped her from carrying out her duties. It seems there were things Mary Livingstone felt disqualified from articulating or even feeling. Was this to do with being married, or being Mary?

Fanny Stevenson on the other hand had a much clearer idea of what she wanted from life (sex and money, mostly) and how to get it. She had been on the prospecting trail in the 1860s with her first husband, Samuel Osbourne, and made a similarly speculative match second time around with the writer Robert Louis Stevenson. When they met he was a sickly specimen and not at all famous; Fanny took him up like a cause and bullied him into fulfilling his potential both as a writer and a cash cow. Her huge emotional investment in Stevenson's career and health paid off eventually (not least in material terms; the Stevenson estate became immensely valuable) but also interfered with every other relationship he had. Friends and family were distracting and harboured germs, therefore friends and family had to keep their distance.

Scooting away from these two 19th century wives, Forster's third example is politician Jennie Lee. She was an untypical wife, neither a true "career woman" (Forster reckons she shelved her own political ambitions to promote those of her husband, Aneurin Bevan), nor a stay-at-home type, since she never wanted children and forced other women to do all the tiresome domestic things she disliked (including, perhaps, sleeping with her husband: they had separate rooms). Forster relies heavily on Lee's autobiographies for her information and at times it begins to sound like Mills and Boon; here is Jennie Lee at her husband's deathbed: "She was very frightened and emotional, and could only bring herself to say, 'Darling, be on my side'." The question of whether this was "good" or "bad" behaviour as a wife hardly seems to matter; Lee emerges as a monster of egotism for whom it's hard to have any sympathy.

Forster was slightly in the wrong place (Carlisle) and time (the 1950s) to benefit much from the feminist revolution and still feels all the injustice of the old order on the quick.

Her ardour is admirable, but this book doesn't match it and has an odd struggling feel, as if the author has set herself an exam question. I doubt that Mary Livingstone or Fanny Stevenson would have stopped to agonise about whether or not they were "good wives". In the 19th century, being married was safe as well as unfair. Nowadays, for better or worse, such a question, for better or worse, is surely the last thing on any woman's mind.