On its face, the long life of Ivy Litvinov (1889-1977), the little-known wife of a famous man, combined decided improbability with curious irrelevance. So unlikely was what happened to her, and so resolutely minor a figure did she remain, that one can only admire John Carswell, her new and loving English biographer,[1] for attempting to make everything sensible and significant. Why he has essayed the task at all is perhaps a subject for Mr. Carswell’s own biographer; our concern here must be with the heroine herself.
She was born Ivy Low, the part-Jewish daughter of a second-rate intellectual jack-of-all-trades who had the good fortune (for his reputation in the eyes of the world and for the esteem of his daughter) to die young. She had, not surprisingly, an unhappy and confined Victorian childhood, which she nevertheless managed to ride into a youthful literary career as a novelist whose most folly imagined subject was herself. Her first novel, Growing Pains (1913), was a sentimental codification of the process that prepared her for adult childishness. It was followed by The Questing Beast (1914), a torrid (for its time) account of office life and the sexual pitfalls of loneliness. Neither book became a best-seller, but The Questing Beast, because of its depiction of scandal, did become a succès d’estime.
In 1916, the twenty-seven-year old Miss Low married Maxim Litvinov, a Bolshevik revolutionary detailed to London for semi-clandestine political and financial activity. After the October Revolution of 1917, Litvinov
