The Mowats

What started as a casual extramarital affair in the summer of 1960, between Farley Mowat and Claire Wheeler, would last for decades. Theirs wasn’t a lusty cyclone that swept everyone around them into a storm of public drama, akin to the Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton scandal that erupted three years later. It was more stiff upper lip and get on with it. Even Mowat’s first wife, Frances, behaved reasonably between the time she learned of the relationship (knowing everyone else knew too) and their eventual divorce in 1965. Back then, there was no internet mob to accuse Farley of abusing Claire because of their age difference, of exploiting a power imbalance (he was well known, and she wasn’t), or of abandoning his wife and children. Artists like him were still given more moral leeway — and were not necessarily expected to behave in a conventional manner. And no one accused Claire of using a man to get ahead.

Claire was twenty-seven when her affair with a...