I recently read The Mapmaker’s Wife which was a really good book and I recommend it. But the title annoyed me. I feel like I’ve read a ton of books titled “The Someone’s Wife”. And there’s reasons for that. The historical reasons why women get regarded as an adjunct of their spouse and the injustices of that are also the reasons why those titles make for good stories that are enjoyed by women who nowadays would never regard themselves as an adjunct. It’s a commentary on how society sees women, not on how women see themselves.

And then I remembered that when I was moving all my book reading data over to this version of my website I was being amused by how many collections of book titles I found that looked like series titles but weren’t. I decided it was about time I collected that data together.

So I’ve made the Not Actually Series page that pulls out books with similar patterns of titles but where the books are by different authors.

The Someone’s Wife series currently consists of

• The Doctor’s Wife by Brian Moore
• The Mapmaker’s Wife by Hannah Evans
• The Photographer’s Wife by Suzanne Joinson
• The Salaryman’s Wife by Sujata Massey
• The Senator’s Wife by Sue Miller
• The Soldier’s Wife by Joanna Trollope
• The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

and there are many other series on the page itself which will stay updated as I read more books matching the titles. In fact I feel like I’m going to end up browsing the library shelves for books that will make more not-actually-series for me!