In what is likely to be the only instance in which one uses such a phrase, it turns out that Dan Brown is part of a grand literary tradition. In the ongoing court case involving allegations that Brown stole most of his ideas for The Da Vinci Code from another book, the most memorable revelation so far has been that Brown’s wife, Blythe, has been doing much of his work for him. While Brown has been busying himself with writing chapters one-and-a-half pages long, Blythe has been ploughing through reference books, marking up key passages, and crisscrossing the Internet in search of information that might help her husband.
Many of the most esteemed authors in history have relied on their wives to help them knock out their tomes: Wordsworth, Nabokov, Carlyle, and, er, Dick Francis, to name but a few. Truly, Brown’s lineage is almost as great as that of his characters with their (possibly) Messianic ancestry.
Certainly, and obviously, an author’s personal life contributes to his work and sometimes a wife’s contribution has simply been to smooth the life around her husband, clearing the way for him to work, undisturbed, as Jessie (wife of Joseph) Conrad did, ditto Nora Joyce.
Not all wives, though, have been content to take such a docile back seat: Jane Carlyle found herself having to keep the ”bores” (that is, Americans) and fans away from her husband Thomas as he wrested out another dense tract in his study. According to Professor Rosemary Ashton, author of Thomas and Jane Carlyle, Jane ”became increasingly bitter and resentful of this role, though obviously it hugely helped her husband”.
Other authors have used their marriages for direct literary inspiration — F Scott Fitzgerald and DH Lawrence spring to mind. Ted Hughes could certainly be included in the latter group and some have suggested that Sylvia Plath had a secret, if crucial, role in the actual writing of Hughes’ poems.
Brown’s evocation of his working relationship with his wife is reminiscent of an altogether different kind of literary relationship, however; one that brings to mind antiquated images of the loud, famous, egocentric man getting all the credit while his quiet mouse of a wife slaves away upstairs.
Nabokov is probably the most illustrious example of this type. His wife, Vera, was his typist, proofreader, editor, agent, business manager, chauffeur and, somewhat intriguingly, the person who would cut up his food for him at every meal.
For years, it was rumoured that Dick Francis’s wife Mary was the true author of the horse-heavy novels. Both always denied it, but Francis was always keen to give his wife credit: ”If it wasn’t for her I wouldn’t have written the stories. She had an English degree and she used to correct my writing, my spelling,” he once said in an interview.
Brown and Francis both write the kind of books in which plot is everything. Employing your wife as your research assistant means there are no worries that your research assistant is going to run off and write a ”spoiler” of her own. Since Mary’s death in 2000, Francis has not written any new works.
Without a doubt the most extreme example of this sort of arrangement is that of Henry Gauthier-Villars. He was a famous French critic in the early part of the 20th century. His most famous work was probably the Claudine series, which he published under his pseudonym, Willy. These turned out to have actually been written by his wife, Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, who Gauthier-Villars would lock in a room until she had written the requisite number of pages.
Occasionally, it is husbands who have provided support to their writing wives. Leonard Woolf is widely credited for creating a sufficiently comforting atmosphere in which his wife Virginia could find enough solace to write. GH Lewes also used to fetch books for his wife, George Eliot, from the libraries as she feared being sneered at outside, owing to their marriage not being legitimate.
One mustn’t leave out even less conventional arrangements. Gertrude Stein, for example, owed much to her lover, Alice B Toklas, albeit in a very different way from those mentioned above. Instead of merely pushing her off to the library to do research, Stein took her lover’s persona and merrily wrote, with fond tongue palpably in cheek, The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas. The book has Alice saying the line: ”I may say that only three times in my life have I met a genius.” One of these geniuses, funnily enough, turns out to be Stein. — Â