For it is certain that without the incentive to live that you offered me I should scarcely have survived the war period and it is more certain still that without your spurring me again to write it I should never have written it again. The famously ugly writer, who was astonishingly successful with a string of beautiful women (including a young and lovely Jean Rhys), wrote what must be one of the most self-regarding dedications of all time when The Good Soldier was re-issued: “My dear Stella, I have always regarded this as my best book, at any rate as the best book of mine of a prewar period and between its writing and the appearance of my next novel nearly 10 years have elapsed, so that whatever I may have since written may be regarded as the work of a different man, as the work of your man. Male writers are certainly capable of the most pompous dedications, though, and Ford Maddox Ford would be hard to beat. In a 2003 article, Susan Johnson traced the changes of heart that showed up via the dedications page, and also discovered astonishing egotism: Luckily for Janis, if not for his fans, the old fellow died before he hitched his fiction to the next star. The star without whom I could not navigate” His last great novel, Ravelstein, contains a vicious portrait of Mrs Bellow No 4 (Alexandra Ionesco Tulesca, Romanian physicist) and a fulsome dedication to Mrs Bellow No 5 (Janis Freedland, former student): He got through five and his dedications are a trail of marital gore. James Atlas, Saul Bellow’s biographer, records that to get his muse working the novelist liked to change wives.

John Sutherland points out that marriages are less than eternal, but a dedication lasts forever:

Love Is Always Write by Jane Davitt