“Marriage is perpetually interesting; it is the novel that most of us are living in,” writes Katie Roiphe in the introduction to her riveting book. Uncommon Arrangements consists of seven honed portraits of married life in London literary circles during the Bloomsbury era that recall Eminent Victorians, Lytton Strachey's masterpiece of condensed biography. Roiphe applies to real-life stories what are indeed a novelist's skills of structure and arrangement. In doing so, she does not merely make a good case for the essential fascination of her subject matter; she inspires one to question afresh whether the enormous cradle-to-grave lives that fill our shelves are really the best way of going about biography.

Roiphe's aim, in which she succeeds triumphantly, is to go inside the marriages she documents, “to look at the oily mechanism, to feel it in my hands, and see how it worked”. None of the couples in question - Rebecca West and HG Wells, 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, Vera Brittain and George Catlin - was conventionally monogamous, and they shared a self-conscious desire to throw off the shackles of Victorian hypocrisy and forge a freer, more equal, more honest way of living. Maynard Keynes spoke for his entire generation when he wrote that “we all want both to have and not to have husbands and wives”.

The sheer complexity of these people's lives is breathtaking, half-heroic, half-irresponsible (one feels a pang to think of Wells and West sending their inconvenient, illegitimate son to boarding-school aged three). Some seem to have coped by adopting an air of “rational” detachment: there is something slightly dislocated about the way in which Vanessa Bell proudly records her lack of embarrassment at taking a bath in front of Duncan Grant who, although gay, would soon become the third man in her life (she already had a husband, Clive Bell, and a lover, Roger Fry).

For others, emotional chaos was nearer the surface: “He was a devil, he ruined my life, he starved me, he was an inexhaustible source of love and friendship to me for 34 years,” wrote West in old age of Wells. West had embarked on the affair as a self-consciously liberated 19-year-old. But although the much older Wells had written idealistically of the “thousand new ways of living open to men and women”, he still needed the bourgeois safety offered by his “Dresden china” wife.

All the relationships in this book turn on the tension between the desire for freedom and a nostalgic yearning for containment. Even Katherine Mansfield, who was so dizzyingly bohemian that she could not countenance a bourgeois teacup, preferring to drink from bowls, found solace in the novels of Jane Austen, the most brilliant propagandist for traditional marriage in the English language. Mansfield's early sexual experiments had resulted in an unwanted pregnancy and gonorrhoea. After she married, she and her husband Middleton Murry moved house 13 times in under two years in a desperate search for domestic tranquillity.

Roiphe's tone is less debunking and more compassionate than Strachey's. Still, she is probing enough to see beyond her subjects' often high-flown theoretical pronouncements and observe the emotional architecture underlying them. Brittain, author of the first-world-war classic Testament of Youth, publicly presented her “semi-detached” marriage to Catlin as the perfect feminist solution. He lived across the Atlantic, while she got on with her career in London, where her best friend Winifred Holtby shared the parenting responsibilities (“I don't like my wife - I'll send him away because I want another woman,” said George and Vera's 21-month-old son in a state of mild confusion). Yet Brittain's squeamishness about traditional married intimacy was, Roiphe suggests, as much a function of her romantic history - she continued to idealise her first love who had been killed in the war - as of her feminist principles.

Roiphe resists judgmentalism, though her reluctance to configure couples in terms of victims and perpetrators occasionally becomes rather strained. How the writer Elizabeth von Arnim could have stayed as long as she did with Bertrand Russell's mad, despotic brother Frank - a cocaine snorter with a history of bigamy - is simply baffling. But if, as Roiphe suggests, von Arnim's dominating personality, unsatisfied with a tepidly “civilised” husband, had been actively looking to meet its match, this was undoubtedly achieved. When von Arnim finally moved out, Frank sued the removal company for aiding and abetting her in stealing, among other items, his tennis balls.

Roiphe could perhaps have made more of the sense of entitlement that enabled her subjects to reject convention. Quite a few were “uncommon” in the sense of having titles; others felt special on account of their talent or wealth. The heiress and lesbian novelist Radclyffe Hall certainly had the latter. Despite her heroic stand against bigotry, her union with Una Troubridge, far from escaping heterosexual patterns of dominance and submission, seems to have exaggerated them to a lurid degree. Hall's emotional megalomania and fascistic, blackshirt-wearing tendencies reveal themselves in an affair with a Russian nurse whom she called her “chinky-faced tartar”. If all Roiphe's subjects were attempting to impose a new template for coupledom on the messiness of real life, none achieved a utopian result. Even the equable Vanessa Bell wrote, “it is an odd disease we all suffer from and I see one can't expect always to be rational”.

This book is able to probe the nature of intimacy as it does because of the extraordinary detail with which its subjects recorded their often tortuous, often exhilarating emotional lives. Sentiments that today would disappear into the ether as text messages were put on paper, such as a note from Roger Fry to Ottoline Morrell, scribbled late at night after they had slept together (“still all amazed and wondering and can't begin to think - I only know how beautiful it was of you, how splendid”). Roiphe makes the most of these literary riches, and she achieves a fine balance between empathy and detachment.

Uncommon Arrangements by Katie Roiphe
Virago £12.99 pp352

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