Quiz: Can you identify these literary spouses and lovers?

Some relationships lasted, others fizzled, all were fascinating

In this Sunday’s edition of Literary Ladies Lite, let’s look at love (and its discontents). See if you can identify the literary couples depicted and described below.

Relationships between brilliant writers were nearly always a complicated, passionate tangle. Some couples preferred non-monogamous arrangements; others agreed that marriage was never in the bargain. An intellectual bond was part of the attraction, often the glue that held these literary love affairs together.

Read on for a capsule of famed literary love affairs and marriages — truly, for better or worse — and see how many you recognize. Answers are at the end!

1 While in her teens, this young woman met her future husband, a follower of her philosopher father. Though he was already married, they paired up post-haste and eloped to France. After the abandoned wife took her own life, the couple married in 1814. Not an auspicious start a marriage.

She was barely twenty-one when her first novel was published. Shocking for its time, it’s considered the first work of science fiction and has kept its grip on the public imagination.

She and her husband had five children, three of whom died before age three. Then, on an 1822 ocean voyage, his craft was lost at sea; his body was recovered days later. Despite his sometimes ill treatment of her, she dedicated herself to promoting his work and reputation as a Romantic poet. She published a few more novels (and many other works) but none had the lasting impact as her first.