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 works—and 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 husband’s work, correcting proofs, placing ads in papers, battling official censors, etc. It reminded me of this post about women writers supporting each other—so many links between women in history that we never hear about. Someone please write a book about the wives of all the great male writers…
(In previous years Sophia, while giving birth to Tolstoy’s 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 drafts—the 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 “Now I am cast aside as of no further use, although I am, nevertheless, expected to do impossible things.”)
Also I shouldn’t be surprised (but I am) at just how many “great male writers” read their wife’s (or female relatives’) 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. There’s Tolstoy (who read Sophia’s diaries and also asked her, when she was 17, to show him a short story she’d written, gave it back to her the next day saying he’d barely glanced at it, when he actually wrote in his diary “What force of truth and simplicity!” and used the story as the embryo for the Rostov family in War and Peace), but also William Wordsworth who read his sister Dorothy’s 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 couldn’t 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. There’s also French novelist Raymond Radiguet who stole his female lover’s diary to write his novel The Devil in the Flesh, and was lauded by fellow male writers & critics for his brilliant insights into a woman’s mind. Which had been copy/pasted from this woman’s diary. [Also, while he didn’t read it until after her death, Henry James’s sister Alice mentions in her diary that he “embedded 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.”] I really love reading women’s journals, and when they were married to a famous writer, you wouldn’t believe how often the person who edited them mentions in the introduction “if some passages sound familiar it’s because her husband was reading her diary and ~getting inspired” ie plagiarising although the term technically doesn’t 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 do—decades of unpaid, unacknowledged work to proofread, copy, publish, preserve from censorship, improve, develop and promote their husband’s writing—with what men do—openly steal ideas and whole sentences from their wife’s writing while forcing her to give birth to 13 children that she didn’t want and he doesn’t help raise.
this is why it drives me nuts when people are all ‘it’s not like i think women are inferior writers, but they just don’t write as much’. my dad, who is an avid reader (like, wow, i wish i could read as much as he does) honestly believes that women aren’t that good because they naturally have no interest in writing. he flat out admitted he won’t read things written by women because he ‘can’t relate’ but when i was in highschool he insisted i read ‘the great classics of world literature’, who were all middle-aged western white dudes. on the rare occasion that he reads a book written by a woman, it’s non-fiction and he makes a point out of mentioning how surprisingly smart he personally thinks the author is.
this carries over into academia, btw. the number of male authors thanking their wives in the acknowledgements for ‘typing the manuscript’ is fucking exhausting - nevermind that it’s rarely just typing, most of the time it’s heavy editing and, if she happens to be in the same field as you, probably also heavy corrections to all the shit you messed up.
Generation after generation, women were blocked at every possible avenue from telling their own stories and their own truths. We did it anyway, but hardly anyone listened. The next generation comes along, sees how few women there are, shrugs, and goes, well women must not be that good at writing. Then blocks women in their own, new ways, and repeats.
Things have improved, but men still do this; wives are much more likely to spend their time and effort reading, editing, typing, etc, their husband’s work than vice versa. Their own writing has to fit in around the edges of their husband’s. Men sometimes outright refuse to read women, except a few deemed exceptional, and rarely do men read as many women as men. While women are told to read men from the time we can read at all. Meanwhile, publishers prioritise men’s submissions and men’s publications. A man writes about a sad man looking for love and it’s a frank and breathtaking exploration of the entire human condition. A woman writes about a sad woman looking for love, and it’s “chick lit”, throw a soft-focus flower on the cover and relegate it to the back shelves. Watch the next generation come along, look around, see how few women write “modern classics”, shrug, and go, well women must not be that good at writing.
