Being married to a writer can be tough. Being married to a male writer who's embarrassed having you around his friends is especially tough. Being married to a male writer who's condescending, misogynistic, sexually jealous, abusive and several inches smaller than you are sounds like a nightmare. The only mystery about Nancy and Lawrence Durrell's marriage is not that it ended but that it lasted as long as it did.

People who knew the couple in their heyday remembered two things about Nancy; her beauty and her silence. The beauty had come suddenly, in her late teens, at art school: a gawky and miserable child, whose mother was endlessly critical of her, whose profligate father starved her of money and whose classmates bullied her mercilessly, she blossomed once she left Lincolnshire for London. She was likened to a deer, a flamingo, a puma. Except, that is, by Lawrence (Larry as everyone called him), who  inimitably unromantic  referred to her as the lamp-post. Another of his cheery nicknames for her was "the slut".

They met when both were 20. Nancy had known other eager suitors before but none to whom she had succumbed; indeed she'd been so ignorant about sex she worried that kissing and cuddling could make you pregnant. Larry's secret was his vulnerability: he looked boyish, wrote poetry and claimed to have a weak heart, and she responded by mothering him. The sex was never that good, she later revealed: inhibited by a fear of pregnancy, she was  he complained  too passive (a "fucking block"). But as an apostle of sex, like his idol Henry Miller, Larry liked to suggest their love-making was titanic.

At 21, Nancy came into a small fortune, thanks to her grandfather and an obscure cousin; Larry, too, had a decent allowance. Having money didn't stop them pursuing a bohemian lifestyle but it made it more comfortable: when they moved from London to a modest cottage in Sussex, Nancy furnished it with a baby grand piano (a present for Larry). The independence she'd enjoyed in London was behind her now; so was the fun. While Larry tried to write his first novel, she cooked and pottered about. She'd never had much confidence in her art  fellow students thought of her as a flibbertigibbet  and Larry did little to encourage her.

In January 1935, on the verge of leaving England for warmer climes, they got married. It was a commitment Larry played down, claiming he'd done it partly to please his mother and partly so as to travel cheaply, as honeymooners. There's a story that he hired a pair of midgets from the local circus to act as witnesses and thus disguise his lack of inches. Less apocryphal, it seems, was his asking the registrar if he could swear his vows on the works of Rabelais rather than on the Bible. As a would-be expat, scornful of Pudding Island and its drab inhabitants, Larry liked nothing more than to épater un petit bourgeois.

On Corfu, sharing a house with the whole Durrell clan (including little Gerald, then just 10), Nancy discovered that not all families are as grim as her own had been. The idyll lasted only four years, until war broke out, but Gerald immortalised it in My Family and Other Animals and Larry in his novel Prospero's Cell, which portrays Nancy as a painterly water nymph, "N". In reality, much of her time was spent in the kitchen making jams and chutneys. But she loved the sun, sea and swimming. The only blots were an abortion (when the nursing staff offered to show Larry the foetus, he told them to "shove it up their arse"), and second, much more damagingly, an interlude in Paris, in the company of Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller.

It was here that the myth of Nancy the Serene and Silent One was born. But the serenity was only skin-deep. And the silence was enforced by Larry, who told her to shut up whenever she tried to join in literary conversations. Fearing the influence of Nin (who said her "recipe for happiness" was "to mix well the sperm of four men in one day"), he also forbade Nancy to spend time with their friends unless he was present. On one occasion he called her a whore for talking to a stranger. On another he kicked her down the stairs when she got back to their flat later than he did. She put up with his brutality in the hope things would improve. Plus, he was an artist and couldn't be expected to live by the rules.

Back in Corfu, with war looming, Nancy was suddenly desperate for a child. "The brat" (Larry's term for his daughter Penelope) came in 1940, while he was working for the British Council in Athens; "Earning a living is a terrible business," he complained, but he had to do his bit for the war effort. As the Axis forces advanced, they moved again, first to Crete, then Cairo. They were spending more and more time apart and Nancy found she preferred it that way; better to be a single parent than to feign a united front. "Nancy is in Jerusalem with the child," Larry reported. "We have split up; just the war I guess." Blaming the war and exonerating himself was typical of Larry. He went on to marry three more times and to write The Alexandria Quartet. Nancy also remarried  to a journalist. The child she had by him, Joanna Hodgkin, is the author of this book.

Amateurs in Eden is a daughter's loyal tribute, drawing on a memoir her mother began and on her own memories of conversations they had. The book doesn't do much to advance Nancy's reputation as an artist, most of her paintings having been lost or destroyed. Nor has it much to say about Larry's fiction. But it's an enjoyable, revisionist account of a bohemian marriage. And a smack in the face for Durrell acolytes who think the great man deserved a worthier first mate.

 Blake Morrison's The Last Weekend is published by Vintage.

Anyone who spent their formative years reading My Family and Other Animals, Gerald Durrell's magnificently funny account of his childhood in 1930s Corfu, is disadvantaged when it comes to the adult contemplation of Lawrence Durrell. It's hard to take The Alexandria Quartet, Prospero's Cell and The Black Book: An Agon with the requisite seriousness when one's strongest impression of the man is as a bossy, opinionated know-it-all who once ended up almost drowning in a quagmire while shooting snipe, an activity for which he possessed no aptitude whatsoever, despite a good deal of boasting to the contrary. In a work overendowed with comic creations, Larry is the most gleefully memorable of the lot.

As it turns out, Gerald Durrell wasn't a very reliable witness. Though he presents Larry as living en famille, producing his deathless prose while masterminding the activities of his scatty siblings, in fact he lived nearby with his wife, Nancy Myers. History has not been entirely kind to Nancy. In addition to being erased from the Corfu cast, she appears in memoirs and novels of the interwar period as a silent beauty, a kind of Greta Garbo-cum-wild animal. Her friend Anaïs Nin described her as a puma and wrote: "I think often of Nancy talking with her eyes, her fingers, her hair, her cheeks, a wonderful gift." It's understandable that Joanna Hodgkin, her daughter by her second marriage, might want to restore to her the function of speech, redrawing these bohemian configurations from the perspective of the puma herself.

Nancy was born in Eastbourne in 1912, and though the first five years of her life were comfortably genteel, her family suffered a mysterious downturn in fortune, necessitating a move to a factory town in Lincolnshire, where they entered that malignantly English drama of keeping up appearances. This experience, combined with a miserable spell at boarding school, left her with a lasting disdain for bourgeois convention. She escaped to art school in London, made friends with a rackety array of male students and reinvented herself as a beauty, with the help of a blunt-cut bob and borrowed lipstick.

It's almost 100 pages before Larry toddles on to the scene, a small blond man who disguises what would later prove a ferocious tongue under an endearing  to Nancy, at least  fondness for baby talk. After a spell in one of those underfurnished Sussex cottages so irresistible to 1930s bohemians, they lit out for Corfu for an Edenic period of swimming, sailing and creative work. The fall came in 1937, when they joined Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin in Paris. The couple had always rowed, but now Larry's bullying slid into cruelty ("Nothing but a dirty Jew" was a favourite insult). Nancy's apparently charming silence is revealed to be the product of a sustained campaign on the part of her husband to keep her isolated behind what Miller later described as a "wall of ice". By the time war began, the marriage was over, although the couple had by then produced a child. After an impossibly dramatic escape from Greece to Cairo aboard various boats and lorries, she left him for good, spending the rest of the war in Palestine.

It's a cracking story, and Hodgkin, who writes historical and detective fiction as Joanna Hines, is a meticulous researcher. But while the externals of Nancy's life are evidently more than deserving of such scrutiny, the woman herself often seems to vanish beneath the drama of what's going on around her. There's no doubt that it takes rare courage to leave a husband in wartime, particularly when one is a refugee with a small child. The problem is that Hodgkin also very much wants to make a case for Nancy as an artist in her own right, but this only emphasises her strange knack for self-erasure.

Little of her work survived the war and what's reproduced here is slight  a few woodcuts and stylish book covers, as well as one of the sculptures she produced during her second marriage in England. Henry Miller apparently thought a lot of one oil painting, but there were also long periods in which she produced no work at all  due, Hodgkin claims, to a crippling case of perfectionism. The argument about how hard it was for women then to make art or build independent friendships is frequently and loyally advanced. It's not untrue, the likes of Vanessa Bell and Gwen John excepted, but all the same it leaves a slightly melancholy cast to the story, since "not quite successful artist" is surely almost as unsatisfactory an epitaph as "puma" or "handmaiden to genius".

Olivia Laing's To the River is published by Canongate