Wives, like everybody else, are individuals with lives of their own. But history and ideology can conspire to strip them of this identity. In the process something essential about the social condition of being a woman is revealed. Of course it isn't a conspiracy; if it were, the story would be simple, with none of the devious tricks and turns that beset the real narratives. It's the complexity of the story – the layers of stories – that gives the story-teller such a headache, and puts the reader in such a position of agnosticism about where the truth lies, or may be hiding, or may actively have been hidden. Was Janet Beveridge a shrew with no academic intelligence of her own, and William Beveridge simply too besotted with her? Did Jeannette Tawney really obstruct Harry Tawney's scholarship with her frivolous and untidy ways? What was Mary Booth really doing in that damp mansion apart from having babies and minding the servants while her husband journeyed abroad? Are we allowed any truthful glimpse of Charlotte Shaw behind the thick veil of her labours helping two men write their own mixtures of fact and fiction?

Digging around in the archives of these four lives was for me a kind of revelatory archaeology. The remains produced didn't always match the catalogue description. I was surprised, for example, to learn about the immense networks Mary Booth orchestrated to facilitate her husband's work, and without which it undoubtedly wouldn't have been what it was. I was amazed to find Charlotte Shaw playing such a key role in the establishment of LSE – whose origins I thought I already knew – and to discover her roles as a translator of radical French literature and as Lawrence of Arabia's muse, editor and friend. Jeannette Tawney's independent life as a writer and pioneering factory inspector was another exposed secret. The architecture of Janet Beveridge's contribution to the budding LSE, to the development of social science, and to William's report on social insurance was much more substantial than I had suspected. In all four cases the stereotypes dominating biographical accounts turned out to hide interesting and authentic stories of wifely life and labour.

This chapter distils some of the central themes from these four narratives of wifehood. It looks at aspects of what the women had in common, and what is communal about the ways in which their lives have been represented by others.