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.
There has been a copy of Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet in my house as long as I can remember, and I held dear many verses from it for a long time. Then I read about his relationship with one Elizabeth Haskell, who supported and edited and worked so closely with him that, “Haskell’s contribution to his writing, including The Prophet, was such that by today’s standard she would be acknowledged as co-author.” (Wikipedia, but there was a much longer article about her I stumbled across once.)
Kind of takes the mystic-spiritual edge off a male writer when you learn that much of what was published under his name was discreetly written into his work by a talented but nameless woman behind the scenes.
