Marriage, George Eliot wrote in "Middlemarch," is a state of awesome "nearness." Arnold Bennett's greatest novel is a terrifying and exhilarating story of the nearness that joins the miserly London bookseller Henry Earlforward to his wife, Violet, as they shut themselves off from a threatening outside world--and also shut themselves off from their uncontrollable inner passions. The only person who intrudes on their solitude is their servant, Elsie, who has very different ideas about her relation to her shell-shocked lover, Joe, and to the world around her. Bennett is best known as the quiet realist of "The Old Wives' Tale," but "Riceyman Steps" probes the unsettling psychological and symbolic depths of a marriage that becomes too close. "Astounding Story of Love and Death," shouts a newspaper headline in the last chapter. This partly describes Bennett's novel, although Elsie and Joe counter it with an equally astounding story of love and life.

2. "The Return of the Soldier" by Rebecca West (Century, 1918).

This brief and devastating novel explores the conflict between marital duty and romantic love but is startlingly different from the many hundreds of other novels on the same theme. Chris Baldry, a British officer in World War I, is sent home from the battlefield after suffering a psychological wound that has erased his memory of the past 15 years. He is puzzled by the expensive-looking stranger named Kitty who explains that he is married to her, and he longs for Margaret, an innkeeper's daughter whom Kitty had never heard of until now. For Chris, the sober reality of marriage (his and Kitty's only child died young) is an illusion, and the bright illusion of romance is a reality. Rebecca West's first novel is a masterpiece of surprise and inevitability, with an ending that evokes intense and unresolvable feelings.

3. "Effi Briest" by Theodor Fontane (1895).

"Effi Briest" is the last of the great 19th-century novels of adultery, but it achieves its intensity and depth through a relaxed, accessible style entirely unlike the heated melodrama of "Anna Karenina" or the cool disdain of "Madame Bovary." The book is as much a gentle comedy about the ordinary humanity of Effi and her stuffily correct husband as it is a tragedy about a marriage that combines social success and emotional failure. The story moves with quiet intensity through the kinds of slow transformations that occur in any marriage, and it shows the ways in which events from the distant past have an unexpected, transforming effect in the present. Samuel Beckett, not known for displays of strong feeling, cried his eyes out over "Effi Briest." Also worth searching for is Fontane's "Beyond Recall," a novel of adultery in which the husband, not the wife, is the one who frivolously and tragically strays from the more severe spouse.

4. "The Prime Minister" by Anthony Trollope (1876).

The fifth and best of Anthony Trollope's six "Palliser" novels is also his subtlest portrait of a marriage. Plantagenet Palliser and his wife, Lady Glencora, who have recently become the Duke and Duchess of Omnium, never resolve the conflict between her unscrupulous ambition and his belief that their marriage so thoroughly unites them that her actions are also his own, even if he disapproves of them. Without making any final judgments, Trollope explores the ways in which a marriage is not just a relation between two persons but also a relation between the married couple and the world around them.

5. "Love in the Western World" by Denis de Rougemont (Harcourt, Brace, 1940).

This swift and sweeping history of eight centuries of romantic passion, from "Tristan and Iseult" to the modern novel of adultery, is more thrilling than most novels, and it is memorably clarifying about the emotional and erotic turmoil of entering adulthood. The book shows how romantic passion, in its most extreme form, can be satisfied only by the death of the lovers: Romeo and Juliet, like all their literary ancestors and heirs, prefer the intense purity of sudden death to the long, humdrum ordinariness of marriage. De Rougemont argues that marriages fail when the partners want a romance that can continue through a lifetime but succeed when the partners recognize that marriage can be more complex, more satisfying and more intense than even the brightest sudden flare of romance. Among the many surprises in this book, written a few months before the start of World War II, is its argument that modern warfare, with its unrelenting goal of total victory, emerged from the same frame of mind that produced the ideal of modern romance.

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