Literary Licentiousness Among The Edwardians

From a new book on the domestic arrangements of English literary types, these touching moments:

The absolute lack of concern for the feelings of children born from, and affected by, these emancipated relationships is a subject which Roiphe does not neglect; thought is also given to three unfortunate spouses who were sacrificed upon the altars of their partners' searches: for heartfelt love (by Una Troubridge), for spiritual union (by Ottoline Morrell), and for sexual pleasure (by HG Wells). Of these three, Una's husband, Admiral Troubridge, appears most to be pitied, as a fairly conventional naval officer whose Catholicism denied him the right of divorce when his wife began a very public relationship with the celebrated lesbian novelist Radclyffe Hall. The pathos of Philip Morrell's role is touchingly evinced in Roiphe's book by the somewhat extraordinary letter that Morrell wrote to Virginia Woolf to thank her for seeming "as if you really liked me for my own sake, and not merely as O's husband" (Woolf had invited him to visit her home for a weekend). Our sympathy for him dwindles a bit, however, when Roiphe describes the sensational evening in 1917 when he burst into his wife's room in the nursing home where she was recovering from a minor ailment to announce that her maid and his secretary were both due to give birth to his babies. Ottoline, typically, took a keen, quasi-maternal interest in her husband's children, and oversaw their religious educations.