Argggh v.3

Behind Every Great Male Writer , a review by Hadley Freeman:
Many of the most esteemed authors in history have relied on their wives—or if not, conveniently placed women such as sisters or daughters—to help them knock out their tomes: Wordsworth, Nabokov, Carlyle, and, er, Dick Francis, to name but a few ... sometimes a wife's contribution has simply been to smooth the life around her husband as much as possible, clearing the way for him to work, undisturbed, as Jessie (wife of Joseph) Conrad did, ditto Nora Joyce. Both of them, according to Jeffrey Meyers in his book Married to Genius, provided a kind of stability for their highly strung husbands.

Fine. I can take it. Ancient history and all that.

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.

Knew that.

Vera was not, however, his bedmate, according to Nabokov's biographer, Brian Boyd—in this one activity, the author preferred to go it alone.

OFCS. Could we not be spared? Anything?

Everyone has to go just a little too far. Nabokov. The great, great beauty of Lectures on Russian Literature. Did you know that Kitty and—the name of that noble, farming clod momentarily escapes me—(Levin, of course. What a dull name.) are, for whole periods of the book, running six months ahead of Anna and Vronksky?

Well yes, all that making like bunnies. Slow, tragic bunnies. Death? Beneath a train? Feh! Stinkers to Brian Boyd, who just could not wait to issue this lifetime spoiler. Oh, hell. What do I care. Speak, Memory is a tad onanistic, come to think of it.

It's just that there is no more odd a sight—from a purely objective point of view, you understand —than the male, what is the clinical term ... jerking off. Do you suppose it was also Vera's duty to watch? From what I've heard, this is something boys like to do. In groups. Working out, I suppose, their latency issues. The poor sods.

Really. Beneath all the attack and dismissal, girls are rock solid, in that we do not agonize in such manner. It is apparent to us that we are female, and, well, it's the whole Object thing all over again, isn't it. It fucks up their minds, and while many a valiant attempt is made to project this obsession onto women and breast size, try as they might, I'm sorry, there is no female equivalent to a hard-on gone limp. Which I gather to be the ruling fear of this or any other time. Believe me, the fact that you plaster your anxieties all over women, children and weaker nations is the real crime. That's what we're charged up about, not you. It's your goddamn unlived life.

Occasionally, too, 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, occasionally, find enough solace to write.

Oh, right. And what year did he die.