Available now from Bloomsbury Academic

 Literary Couples and 20th-Century Life Writing:  Narrative and Intimacy is a study of multimodal narrativity in modernist and late modernist life writing about couplehood, love, marriage, and desire.

Read the review in The Times Literary Supplement

“This lively monograph by Janine Utell—who has previously written about James Joyce’s treatments of marriage and desire—contributes to Woolf studies, modernist studies, and life-writing studies.” — Jesse Wolfe, author of Bloomsbury, Modernism, and the Reinvention of Intimacy, Woolf Studies Annual (read the full review here [PDF])

Exploring life writing by literary couples such 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, Janine Utell draws on the latest work in narrative theory and the study of intimacy and affects to shed light on the importance of ethics to our understanding of relationality in the modern period. Examining a range of genres and media, from memoir through documentary film to comics, the book demonstrates that stories are essential for our thinking of love, desire and sexuality.