The trial of Roald Dahl is under way. The late children’s author’s antisemitism has been well chronicled: talking about Jews in the New Statesman magazine in 1983, he remarked that “even a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on them for no reason”.

Earlier this month Penguin Random House announced that it would publish Dahl’s books with passages relating to weight, mental health, gender and race cut or rewritten to fit modern sensibilities. After a backlash from Salman Rushdie (“absurd censorship”) and free speech groups, the company said 16 books would also be published in their original form.

Meanwhile a recent biography by Matthew Dennison, Teller of the Unexpected, seeks to rescue Dahl from the flaming torch and pitchfork-wielding mob, preferring not to dwell on his unsavoury side. A new book by Carmela Ciuraru, however, puts the author right back before judge and jury.

Lives of the Wives explores five literary marriages full of tempest and tumult, offering rich biographical portraits and examining the role of ambition, narcissism, misogyny, infidelity and alcoholism in relationships where imbalance seems baked in from the start.

Ciuraru is American but excavates most of her material in Britain, selecting Dahl and actor Patricia Neal; Kenneth Tynan and his American wife, Elaine Dundy; Kingsley Amis and Elizabeth Jane Howard; lesbian couple Radclyffe Hall and Una Troubridge; and Alberto Moravia and Elsa Morante, two of Italy’s most important postwar novelists.

None of the couples is still alive. Dahl died in 1990 at the age of 74. His books, which have sold more than 300m copies, have been translated into 68 languages. Numerous stage and screen adaptations include Matilda the Musical and two Willy Wonka films based on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory with a third on the way. It would be fair to say that he does not emerge from Lives of the Wives with his reputation enhanced.

“He may have won the worst husband award in my book,” Ciuraru says by phone from New York. “I don’t know: it’s a tight race with Ken Tynan for who wins the award. I had to take a break from him. But that said, I do separate the art from the artist, and I could still go back and talk about and analyse what’s unpleasant or misogynistic or racist or all these other issues that he had and still find something to enjoy in the books. I don’t think in terms of black and white about art or literature at all.”

Neal was a film star who, aged 27, married Dahl, then 36, in New York in 1953. The New York Times issued an announcement that said: “Patricia Neal and writer wed.” The author notes that Dahl enjoyed basking in Neal’s glow until he despised her for earning more than he did and felt emasculated by her fame.

Ciuraru says: “I think that was very difficult for him. With writers, you’re dealing sometimes with ruthless ambition and ego and drive and there’s just a lot of complexity there. I don’t judge them. Most of the people in this book suffered a lot of trauma in childhood and they were damaged people doing the best they could for the most part.”

A friend advised Neal that she could carry on being the breadwinner as long as Dahl controlled the bank account and she did all the cooking and cleaning. When Neal suffered two major strokes, Dahl became her “bully, tormentor and protector”. Her syntax was jumbled and she struggled to utter the words she wanted. When Neal wanted something, Dahl would place the object just beyond her reach and withhold it until she was able to say the correct word.

Ciuraru writes: “Friends who saw her around this time described Roald in various ways – dog trainer, stage manager, drill sergeant, traffic cop – as he goaded and humiliated his wife into recovery, step by step.” The methodology was “punitive” but also “effective”: she eventually did recover and became an advocate for stroke victims, though the marriage was doomed.

At times Dahl struck Ciuraru as a “psychopath” but she also notes: “I would argue that Patricia may not have survived without Roald Dahl’s bullying. He essentially bullied her back into health, walking and talking again after her series of strokes. It was complicated but, without his help, however cruel it was, she was able to act again, which is extraordinary.”

This and other stories in the book suggest that a wife’s lot is largely one of silence, resilience and forbearance. The author makes a stark point in her introduction: “The problem with being a wife is being a wife.” She reminds us that historically the primary function of marriage was to bind women to men as a form of property and protect bloodlines by producing legitimate offspring. The myth of Adam and Eve enshrined the premise that a woman’s existence depends on a dominant man.

With literary marriage, it appears, the power dynamic is on steroids. Ciuraru writes: “With an ego the size of a small nation, the literary lion is powerful on the page, but a helpless kitten in daily life – dependent on his wife to fold an umbrella, answer the phone, or lick a stamp (looking at you, Vladimir!). Those towering mononymic geniuses of Western literature – Tolstoy, Dickens, Dostoyevsky, Hemingway, Nabokov – where would they be without their wives?”

Few have enjoyed a room of one’s own – or the luxury of writing time amid quotidian chores. Novelist Ann Patchett told the Guardian in 2016: “How exhausting it is, as a woman, to always be the one who has to make the food and change the beds. No matter how enlightened, how much of a feminist I am, I am still doing all of it. [With] every book I think: well, if this one’s really successful, maybe I won’t have to make dinner any more.”

Ciuraru says by phone: “I’m not trying to demonise marriage or even writers’ marriages because there are some wonderful ones out there, contemporary and historical. But, at least in the stories on my book, there was a lot of drinking and some psychological abuse. When you bring in money, power and fame, these issues of the power imbalance within the marriage get magnified and that can be very painful.”

But there is also power in taking the role of gatekeeper, she adds. “It’s very seductive to be with a famous person and all the benefits and the opportunities, social and otherwise, that may bring. It’s very exciting and, for some of those women, maybe they stayed too long, but they were also in love and it was wonderful to be right there as some of these great writers were creating their best work. It’s not just a one-way street there.”

Tynan, theatre critic for the Observer, encouraged Dundy to write, then flew into a jealous rage when she became a critical success. After her first book became a bestseller, he threatened divorce and told her not to write another; she duly set to work on a new novel the following morning. Ciuraru comments: “It was mental cruelty for the most part, although there is a scene in the book when Tynan strikes his wife and it’s really frightening for her.”

In 1956, Tynan championed John Osborne’s norm-busting play Look Back in Anger. Ciuraru suggests that he may have been describing his own marriage when he wrote: “Mr Osborne’s picture of a certain kind of modern marriage is hilariously accurate; he shows us two attractive young animals engaged in competitive martyrdom, each with its teeth sunk deep in the other’s neck, and each reluctant to break the clinch for fear of bleeding to death.”

Hall, best known today for her groundbreaking novel The Well of Loneliness, and Troubridge are the sole same-sex couple in the book and, in some ways, had the most conventional partnership, with Hall taking the role of controlling husband and Troubridge that of submissive wife.

Ciuraru reflects: “There are different ways to label husband and wife. I would say Leonard Woolf was the wife in terms of being a caregiver for Virginia Woolf, so I could have easily written about him, but he’s written about way too much. I just thought, gosh, there are these two women but they’re the most traditional and the most politically conservative in the book, and I thought that was funny.

“They had these nasty antisemitic views and Radclyffe Hall didn’t particularly like dealing with women in business and preferred to deal with men. They were in favour of women’s rights to a point, but not really. They were a funny couple and more rigid than some of the others in terms of what the ‘man of the house does’, which is to write and do as you wish and Una being this devoted wife.

“Una had been married to a man and felt depressed and trapped and frustrated by having to bury her artistic ambitions. She was very talented and a translator and a gifted artist. It’s wild that when she fell in love with Hall, suddenly she wanted to be the wife and that was her vocation and she was proud of it and was a partner in the work. It was a fascinating couple to write about.”

She adds: “What I also love about them is that they’re the only couple in the book whose relationship endured until Radclyffe Hall died. They had very difficult times. It’s a crazy story: Una came into a love triangle when Hall was with another woman and ended up in another love triangle, when she was with Hall with another woman interloper. It’s a wild journey but they stayed together.”

Howard ultimately divorced Amis to devote herself to her own writing. She once recalled: “I really couldn’t write very much when I was married to him because I had a very large household to keep up and Kingsley wasn’t one to boil an egg, if you know what I mean.”

Ciuraru comments: “The women in the book often had difficult mothers or abusive mothers and had low self-esteem. Elizabeth Jane Howard really struggled. She just was constantly finding herself at rock bottom and not being able to pick herself up. She talked extensively about how her mother hated her and let her know that.

“I feel a vast empathy for both the men and the women in this book and what they went through and the courage and resilience of the women. They were tough, brave women. I can’t pretend that these are happy stories but they’re rich and entertaining and surprising and ultimately, if not inspiring, maybe consoling because these women do emerge to stand on their own in their own way. It’s not the life that they expected or thought they wanted, but they got a lot from from leaving those marriages and being able to do work that they wanted to do.”

Lives of the Wives is not your ideal wedding gift. But Ciuraru, who is in a long-term relationship, would like it to encourage readers to think about their own marriages and partnerships. “I hope that if they are someone who harbours creative ambition, they will learn from these women not to wait and to try to make that work within their marriage and claim the space to do so,” she says.

“Even though there are so many more options today, I see women burying or delaying their own ambitions for their husbands. Some of those are gladly sacrificed and others are brimming with resentment and fury. I hope the book is timely because these are still issues. I’ve seen comments where one woman said, ‘My ex-husband said to me: if you make more money than I do, how is this a marriage?’ I don’t blame men; what is it in society that is making men feel weaker if the woman is the breadwinner? I don’t have any answers but I think it’s interesting to talk about.

“I know one woman who is secretly writing a novel and not telling her husband because she feels that she can’t do that. But at the same time, I have a friend who is married to an artist and who’s very nurturing and very loving and is happy to do all the driving and all the cooking and everything to support her work. There’s any number of varieties of marriages out there. I hope that people will look at these and say, ‘Well, mine is better than that’, or ‘Oh, this resonates in a really uncomfortable way. Maybe I’d better address that!’”

• Lives of the Wives is out now