The conceit of this column is simple: I write about books I’m reading. New, old, obscure, overrated — whatever’s on the nightstand is fair game. So while most weeks are devoted to new releases or Booker longlisters, others, like this one, begin with a forgotten 82-year-old novel handed to me by a coworker who wondered what I would make of it.

The book is “Wife to Mr. Milton,” a 1943 novel by Robert Graves. The author’s name rang familiar: war poet, mythographer, the stern schoolmaster behind “I, Claudius” and “The White Goddess.” I opened it expecting literary condescension, period pastiche, maybe a little man­splaining with my metaphors. What I got instead was something stranger: a sharp, simmering, quietly radical novel told in the voice of John Milton’s forgotten wife — a voice that felt like it had waited centuries for someone to listen.

“Wife to Mr. Milton” wasn’t what I thought Graves was capable of writing. It reads like a time capsule with teeth: sly, bruised, formally conservative yet thematically subversive. I couldn’t put it down.

This wasn’t just a curiosity rescued from the back shelves. It was, in its way, a revelation. It didn’t feel like Graves had written a feminist novel on purpose, but somehow, he had.

In 2010, British literary biographer Geoffrey Wall called “Wife to Mr. Milton” “a relentlessly effective satire on masculine self-regard.” It’s a useful description, but maybe too tidy. The novel doesn’t just poke fun at patriarchal ego — it dismantles it. It smuggles subversion into historical fiction and disguises fury as formality. If Wall is right that this is satire, it’s the kind that’s sharpened like a stiletto: to cut.

The story is told in the voice of Marie Powell, a largely unknown historical figure who became the first wife of John Milton, titan of English letters, author of “Paradise Lost,” and puritanical defender of liberty. In Graves’ retelling, Milton is no Romantic visionary — he’s cold, pedantic, emotionally closed off. A man who can write about Satan with sympathy but cannot speak to his wife without a sermon.

“He liked silence in a wife,” Marie recalls. “I gave him silence, but not the kind he wanted.”

That line is a demolition. It collapses centuries of patriarchal ideal into 16 words. Milton’s intellectual freedom becomes indistinguishable from domestic tyranny. His liberty ends at the front door. And the voice narrating it all — dry, clipped, retrospectively bruised — is unforgettable.

“Wife to Mr. Milton” is an act of literary ventriloquism as well as a quietly furious work of historical recovery, a precursor to what’s now a thriving genre of counter-historical fiction voiced by women left out of the record — think Jean Rhys’ “Wide Sargasso Sea,” Pat Barker’s “The Silence of the Girls,” Maggie O’ Farrell’s “Hamnet” or Anita Diamant’s “The Red Tent.” What makes Graves’ contribution uncanny — and a bit uncomfortable — is that it was written by a man best known for theorizing about the feminine as myth while rarely engaging with women as individuals.

A........

© Arkansas Online