The seismic social upheaval resulting from World War I, the bitter and often violent protest for and against women’s rights, the opening of Britain’s first birth control clinics in the early 1920s: All these conditions combined to shatter traditional Victorian ideals of marriage.

If procreation and child-rearing were no longer to be the institution’s primary rationale, and if the male partner was no longer automatically accepted as master of the house, then “the scene was set for an epic power struggle,” as the canny and provocative social critic Katie Roiphe writes in “Uncommon Arrangements” (Dial Press, 303 pages, $26), her examination of seven famous “marriages à la mode” in early 20th-century England.

Ms. Roiphe’s subjects, who include H.G. Wells, Vera Brittain, Elizabeth von Arnim, Katherine Mansfield, and the manly lesbian author Radclyffe Hall, were artists and intellectuals who sought creative new ways to approach the problems of marriage. “They were determined to live differently, to import the ideas of political progress into their most personal relations,” Ms. Roiphe writes. The results were occasionally inspiring, but more often they were bumbling, comic, and even disastrous. Like so many utopians, these idealists tried to approach human relations through reason, failing to take into account that we are all biologically programmed animals, subject to jealousy, possessiveness, and countless other irrational passions.

H.G. Wells, whose radical books and theories celebrated the “New Woman,” was not best pleased when he encountered the real thing. His famous ménage with Rebecca West soon acquired all the hypocritical trappings of the traditional marriage he had spent his career trying to change, and in the end he retreated with relief to the arms of his infinitely accommodating wife.

Lady Ottoline Morrell “aspired to living her life as poetry, with all of the excesses and pretensions that entailed.” She assumed the role of muse with her big-shot lovers, who included Bertrand Russell and Axel Munthe, while her conventional husband, Philip, failed to live up to her romantic expectations.

Elizabeth von Arnim, apparently the model of the independent and successful woman, allowed herself to be regularly locked up by her satanic mate. Radclyffe Hall, an acclaimed novelist, but a rather stupid woman, wanted to have both a “wife” — Lady Una Troubridge — and a harem of beauties too, in keeping with her role as an aristocratic Edwardian roué.

Ms. Roiphe points out that by 21st-century standards, children of that era were hardly taken into account. Anthony West, the illegitimate son of Wells and Rebecca West, was sent to boarding school before he turned 4. Radclyffe Hall boarded out Una’s little daughter Andrea, whom she carelessly referred to as “the cub,” with a local dog-breeder.

Ms. Roiphe’s devotes her most engrossing chapter to Vera Brittain’s “semi-detached” marriage to the political philosopher George Gordon Catlin. Brittain’s fiancé had been killed in World War I (a story told in her best-selling memoir “Testament of Youth”). “Severed at a stage of unconsummated longing and novelty,” Ms. Roiphe writes, “the relationship would remain forever the central articulation of passion in Vera’s life.” Her union with Catlin was lukewarm, and true companionship was provided by her friend Winifred Holtby, a novelist and journalist, who moved in with the couple and lived with them for many years until her death at the early age of 37. Ms. Roiphe always tries to be fair, but she clearly pities Catlin, greatly admires Holtby, and feels considerable distaste for Brittain, who “seemed to find it nearly impossible to exhaust the literary possibilities of herself.”

The book’s least interesting section on Vanessa and Clive Bell rehashes the various sexual permutations of the Bloomsbury group for the umpteenth time. The Bells, Duncan Grant, Roger Fry, David Garnett, etc., etc.: It’s the same old crowd, with their messianic selfimportance and what Ms. Roiphe dignifies as the “rigorous moral inquiry of their personal lives.” “Determined to live freely and rationally, unlike their parents and grandparents,” the Bells told more well-meaning lies to their daughter, Angelica, than even their most repressed Victorian forebears had ever foisted on them. Angelica Garnett’s astounding memoir, “Deceived By Kindness,” is essential reading for anyone inclined to be seduced by the Bloomsbury style of “rigorous moral inquiry.”

Most of the innovative thinkers in this book came to discover that marriage possessed a momentum and pattern of its own and did not lend itself to social engineering as readily as they had once assumed. “That so many of the couples I describe,” Ms. Roiphe writes,

were willing to remain in a shell of a marriage, sometimes a marriage that existed in name only, says a great deal about the enduring power of the institution, even during a time when that power was actively being questioned.

The author is an intelligent and sharp observer, as well as a refreshingly clear writer, but she sometimes accepts her subjects’ interpretations of their own lives a little too easily. “What is striking is how much they managed to commit to paper,” she tell us, “how much nuance, how much detail, how much emotional substance they captured in writing.” Yes: but how much lying, too, how much selfmythologizing, how much egogratification. With a few exceptions (Jane Wells, Winifred Holtby, Philip Morrell) Ms. Roiphe has taken on some world-class narcissists.

Ms. Allen is the author of two collections of literary essays and one work of history, “Moral Minority: Our Skeptical Founding Fathers.” She last wrote for these pages on Thomas Hardy.