The Lives of Wives July 2026

A kind of a variation of a theme from last month’s ‘Love and Marriage’ . Here the focus is the wife, two from Herik Ibsen’s plays come to mind: Nora Helmer and Hedda Gabbler, two very different women and wives who assert their right to be in different ways.

I am going to be a bit ambitious and see if I can read 4 books for this challenge:

The Stepford Wives by Ira Levin
The Cloning of Joanna May by Fay Weldon
A screenplay of the movie Thelma and Louise
The End of the Affair by Graham Greene

And I also hope to watch:


What are you hoping to read / watch for this challenge?

I would like to read The Wives: A Memoir, which is on my shelf. However, according to a lady I work with, it will make me mad! She claims it's very anti-military and I'm an Air Force brat...... So............

A few years ago I read a book about the wife of Orson wells I think it was something about an invisible wife I am having a devil of a time finding it in my book journal on my book shel and it's driving me a little crazy Anyone there that remembers this and can give me the name of it I would really appreciate it

wifedomFOUND IT! perfect for this theme

I am planning on reading The President's Wife by Tracey Enerson Wood which is about Woodow Wilson's wife, Edith.

I'm thinking about reading the letters of Abigail and John Adams. Perhaps this one: My Dearest Friend : Letters of Abigail and John Adams, as my library has a copy available.

>4 cindydavid4: Isn't that about George Orwell's wife and not Orson Wells?

all of my life i have confused them, and cant seem to find a way to remember them; but yes you are correct, my apologies I can match books with authors tho

>8 cindydavid4: the names are similar. Normally would not have noticed, but I checked because I had never heard of Orson Welles' wife!

>9 Tess_W: Well, Orson Welles was married to Rita Hayworth for a short time.

>10 DeltaQueen50: Yes, I just found that out! Interesting.........

I plan to read Hedda Gabler by Henrik Ibsen. Thank you for the recommendation in >1 AnishaInkspill:!

I've got Carl Sferrazza Anthony's Florence Harding: The First Lady, the Jazz Age, and the Death of America's Most Scandalous President somewhere around the house but I'm not sure if I can find it by July. If I can, I'm going to read it in conjunction with one or another of my biographies of Warren Harding – the one by John "Watergate" Dean in Arthur Schlesinger's American Presidents Series ... The Jazz Age President by Ryan Walters ... Francis Russell's The Shadow of Blooming Grove.

If I can't put my hands readily enough on Anthony's biography of Florence Harding, then I might do Elizabeth Gaskell's Wives and Daughters. It's just about the only significant Gaskell work I've yet to read, but I'd been planning on saving it for the September theme of "Daughters."

>13 CurrerBell: If you read the book on Florence Harding, please let me know what the author has to say about Florence's "illegitimate" son. I did a research on the Hardings in college and she was certainly married to the boy's father. Unless, of course, new info has been found in the last 40 years that the marriage wasn't legal. I saw the divorce filing on the grounds of desertion.

I'm interested in all things Harding because I grew up not two blocks from where the Harding Home is and have probably visited it and the tomb 20-30 times.

>14 Tess_W: Personally, I think Harding's the most underrated President. Not a great President by any standard, of course, but vastly underrated as a result of the scandals and even more so his mistress Nan Britton's tell-all memoir. He freed Eugene Debs and a number of other WWI war resisters from Woodrow Wilson's prisons (commutations but not full pardons). He convened the Washington Naval Conference and shepherded the subsequent treaty through Senate ratification, the first multi-national arms control treaty in history. He advocated for anti-lynching laws and was generally, by the standards of the 1920s, a civil rights liberal at least certainly in contrast to Wilson.

Harding makes substantial appearance in Gore Vidal's Hollywood, the fifth volume of Vidal's Narratives of Empire heptology (chrono, not publication, order) and is presented rather favorably. At the conclusion of the novel, Vidal quotes his late grandfather, Thomas Gore, the blind Democratic anti-interventionist senator from Oklahoma, that Harding was "too nice a man to be president."

I just a few days ago finished Nancy Milford's Savage Beauty, her very definitely 5***** biography of Edna St Vincent Millay, which just reminded me of her Pulitzer-nominated biography of Zelda, which some folks might be interested in. I haven't read and don't own Zelda and don't plan to (my interest in Milford's Millay-biography being the state-of-Maine connection, not the Fitzgeralds and the Jazz Age). but it might be of interest to some other members of this group.

If I can't find the Florence Harding bio, though, it occurred to me that I do know where my copy is of Mary Gabriel's Love and Capital: Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of a Revolution, though I think that one may be more centered not so much on Jenny but on Karl himself and his marital and familial relationships.

>15 CurrerBell: well I wouldn't go as far as Gore. IMHO, there was little "nice" about Harding. Although Harding had the experience of being a senator, once he got to DC it appeared that he had no idea about the inner workings of government. Rather than providing strong leadership, he seemed more interested in leisure activities such as golf, poker, and pursuing extramarital relationships—behavior that rivaled that of later presidents like Clinton and Kennedy. Whatever meaningful accomplishments emerged during his tenure appear to have been driven largely by members of his inner circle, whose actions often seemed designed to benefit themselves first and the country second. Lots of stories in Marion, Ohio, about his orgies before he even went to DC. Also, Florence literally ran Harding's newspaper after their marriage, making it a viable interest. Before her management, it almost closed. I may have to read Vidal........

I've found another book to read for this topic: Nella Last's War: The Second World War Diaries of Housewife, 49.
I read about this diary in the book I read for the May events challenge, Five Days in London: May 1940. Nella Last was part of the UK Mass Observation project and she kept a personal diary during WWII. She was only identified as "Housewife, 49", and she records her feelings as a housewife about the war. This diary was used by the government to determine the popular sentiment of average people as the war was going on.

I'm looking forward to this one, especially since my library seems to be having trouble finding the book I originally wanted to read of Abigail & John Adams' letters.

>18 kac522: Nella sounds very good!

>19 Tess_W: Yes, doesn't it sound good? Just from quickly looking at this, Nella's diary was so well written that it is one of the few that were published on its own. And Nella would go on to keep her diary for the rest of her life. But I'll write more when I finally sit down to read it. (Plus it fits the RandomKIT theme of WWII!).

I finally remembered that I've got a copy of The Astronaut Wives Club on my shelves, so I will be reading that in July.