“The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing”: As Pascal advises, love should be understood from the inside out, and does not follow the dictates of reason. In Uncommon Arrangements, Katie Roiphe presents seven case studies in the self-deception that results from the rationalization of romance. Drawing from the unsettled social ferment of artistic England between the wars, Roiphe examines the marriages of H.G. Wells and his wife Jane, Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murry, Elizabeth von Arnim and John Francis Russell, Vanessa and Clive Bell, Ottoline and Philip Morrell, Radclyffe Hall and Una Troubridge, and Vera Brittain and George Gordon Catlin. “What,” Roiphe asks, “can they tell me? What can they teach?”

The answer, from the evidence Roiphe presents, would seem to be that love is best sustained by fidelity, honesty (not to be confused with self-serving candor), and empathetic consideration; a sense of humor is a big help, too. None of which is a surprise, not that any of Roiphe’s subjects figured it out. All of them self-styled erotic rebels if not revolutionaries, they blotted many a page with high-flown rhetoric in justification of adultery (otherwise known as “free love”), unfaithfulness, and outright emotional cruelty. They “raised their personal lives to the level of philosophy,” Roiphe writes. “They felt that their love affairs and marriages were themselves creative acts.” Yet they wondered, sometimes for all lifelong, why they were so unfulfilled.

Roiphe wonders with them: “In spite of the most progressive, forward-thinking intentions of the couples in this book, it is astonishing what a stubborn hold the most archaic ideas of marriage have on their imaginations.” Is it really? Or is it the case that high-sounding slogans camouflaged emotional exploitation: the hypocrisy of H.G. Wells, the passive-aggression of Mansfield and Murry, the vacuity of Ottoline Morrell (and her husband), the erotic totalitarianism of Hall, the selfishness of Brittain? As Chico Marx put it so well, “Who are you going to believe? Me or your own eyes?”

By choosing such well-documented figures, Roiphe assured herself much time in the library, as her bloated bibliography indicates. She might have been better served to have read half as much and to have given more time to thought. She is devoted to the empty rhetorical question “Can this have been true?” “Was he, in fact, in love with her?” and blithely oblivious to the human realities animating the series of note cards she has cobbled together into her chapters, which read like the seminar papers of a dedicated graduate-school student.

“There were moments,” Roiphe writes, “that I felt myself come close to something almost alive.” She reminds herself that “this is a way of reading that I learned in graduate school was unsophisticated, childish.” Alas, she learned too well. Whatever else may be said about Roiphe’s subjects, their lives were not dull, and Uncommon Arrangements needs less of the mustiness of the library and more of the bracing air of lived experience. Roiphe finds herself as unenlightened at her conclusion as she was at the beginning. Her close reading was the wrong method to understand any marriage—indeed, any human reality. Intelligence is always trying to catch up to experience.