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 worksāand 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 husbandās work, correcting proofs, placing ads in papers, battling official censors, etc.
It reminded me of this post about women writers supporting each otherāso many links between women in history that we never hear about. Someone please write a book about the wives of all the great male writersā¦
(In previous years Sophia, while giving birth to Tolstoyās 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 draftsāthe 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 āNow I am cast aside as of no further use, although I am, nevertheless, expected to do impossible things.ā)
Also I shouldnāt be surprised (but I am) at just how manyĀ āgreat male writersā read their wifeās (or female relativesā) 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. Thereās Tolstoy (who read Sophiaās diaries and also asked her, when she was 17, to show him a short story sheād written, gave it back to her the next day saying heād barely glanced at it, when he actually wrote in his diary āWhat force of truth and simplicity!ā and used the story as the embryo for the Rostov family in War and Peace), but also William Wordsworth who read his sister Dorothyās 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 couldnāt 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. Thereās also French novelist Raymond Radiguet who stole his female loverās diary to write his novel The Devil in the Flesh, and was lauded by fellow male writers & critics for his brilliant insights into a womanās mind. Which had been copy/pasted from this womanās diary.
[Also, while he didnāt read it until after her death, Henry Jamesās sister Alice mentions in her diary that he āembedded 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.ā]
I really love reading womenās journals, and when they were married to a famous writer, you wouldnāt believe how often the person who edited them mentions in the introductionĀ āif some passages sound familiar itās because her husband was reading her diary and ~getting inspiredā ie plagiarising although the term technically doesnāt 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 doādecades of unpaid, unacknowledged work to proofread, copy, publish, preserve from censorship, improve, develop and promote their husbandās writingāwith what men doāopenly steal ideas and whole sentences from their wifeās writing while forcing her to give birth to 13 children that she didnāt want and he doesnāt help raise.
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