I found out recently that at a time of his life when Tolstoy was in a slump and had stopped writing & earning money, his wife Sophia borrowed money from her mum to start her own publishing office and publish editions of his worksâand in order to figure out how publishing worked, she travelled to St Petersburg to ask Anna Dostoyevsky for advice, as Anna had also spent the past 14 years planning the editions of her husbandâs work, correcting proofs, placing ads in papers, battling official censors, etc.
It reminded me of this post about women writers supporting each otherâso many links between women in history that we never hear about. Someone please write a book about the wives of all the great male writersâŚ
(In previous years Sophia, while giving birth to Tolstoyâs 13 children and raising them and managing his estate (he was a count) pretty much on her own, also wrote the clean copies of all of his manuscripts out of his nearly illegible draftsâthe final draft of War and Peace was 3,000 pages and she copied it seven times, correcting spelling and grammar and offering key suggestions and critiques of the plot; for example explaining to him that people would be more interested in the social or romantic plots, the human aspects, than in the minutiae of the battles and war strategy plots. A few months before his death, Tolstoy named a male friend the executor of his literary estate rather than his wife, who had been doing this thankless job since she was 19, and gave to the public domain all the copyrights to his works that Sophia had previously owned (for her publishing company). She wrote in her diary âNow I am cast aside as of no further use, although I am, nevertheless, expected to do impossible things.â)
Also I shouldnât be surprised (but I am) at just how many âgreat male writersâ read their wifeâs (or female relativesâ) diaries and drew a lot of inspiration from them, stealing ideas or even sometimes entire sentences / paragraphs / poems out of them. This is such a recurrent pattern. Thereâs Tolstoy (who read Sophiaâs diaries and also asked her, when she was 17, to show him a short story sheâd written, gave it back to her the next day saying heâd barely glanced at it, when he actually wrote in his diary âWhat force of truth and simplicity!â and used the story as the embryo for the Rostov family in War and Peace), but also William Wordsworth who read his sister Dorothyâs journal and drew a lot from it, and F. Scott Fitzgerald of course. When Zelda was still young a magazine editor offered to publish parts of her journals, and her husband (of 5 months!) said he couldnât allow it because he drew a lot of inspiration from them and planned on using parts of them in his future novels and short stories. Thereâs also French novelist Raymond Radiguet who stole his female loverâs diary to write his novel The Devil in the Flesh, and was lauded by fellow male writers & critics for his brilliant insights into a womanâs mind. Which had been copy/pasted from this womanâs diary.
[Also, while he didnât read it until after her death, Henry Jamesâs sister Alice mentions in her diary that he âembedded in his pages many pearls fallen from my lips, which he steals in the most unblushing way, saying, simply, that he knew they had been said by the family, so it did not matter.â]
I really love reading womenâs journals, and when they were married to a famous writer, you wouldnât believe how often the person who edited them mentions in the introduction âif some passages sound familiar itâs because her husband was reading her diary and ~getting inspiredâ ie plagiarising although the term technically doesnât apply because every word his wife wrote and idea she had was legally his property (just like she was).
It makes me feel so bitter to contrast what women doâdecades of unpaid, unacknowledged work to proofread, copy, publish, preserve from censorship, improve, develop and promote their husbandâs writingâwith what men doâopenly steal ideas and whole sentences from their wifeâs writing while forcing her to give birth to 13 children that she didnât want and he doesnât help raise.
