{UAH} AND YET WE STILL CALL IT LAKE VICTORIA

John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath and the literary spouse

When Steinbeck was stumped for a title for his novel, his wife saved the day. Literary history is full of marital interventions, but what's your favourite example of writers wedded to their inspiration?

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• theguardian.com, Saturday 12 April 2014 12.00 BST

What's in a name? … The Grapes of Wrath. Photograph: Allstar/Cinetext/

The 75th anniversary of the publication of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath on Monday April 14 is a reminder of the potentially key role of literary spouses. Steinbeck didn't like his own ideas for the title, so when his wife Carol proposed a phrase from "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" he adopted it at once.

This set us thinking about the impact of other partners on the history of literature. As the following examples show, though usually either dismissed as humble help­meets or complained about as posthumous image-protectors, they can sometimes decisively shape a book or career.

Frankenstein (1818)
Percy Shelley didn't suggest a ghost-story writing game (that was Byron) or come up with the creature (that was Mary Shelley herself), but during the famous Swiss house party he did urge his teenage bride to transform her short story into a novel.

Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850)
Elizabeth Barrett Browning's verse love letters to Robert Browning were intended to remain private, but he encouraged her to publish them. Their portrayal of him was of course far from unflattering.

Scenes of Clerical Life (1859)
George Eliot's partner GH Lewes (she called herself "Mrs Lewes") is credited with persuading to her to take up fiction, sending the first anonymous results to her eventual publisher, then generally acting as a Victorian equivalent of agent/publicist.

Gone with the Wind (1936)
Required to lug library books home daily for Margaret Mitchell as she recovered from injury, her copy editor husband John bought her the Remington typewriter on which she bashed out her first published novel. Sales to date: more than 30m.

Brighton Rock (1938)
Now invariably labelled a "Catholic novelist" Graham Greene converted to share his wife Vivien's faith before their marriage in 1927.

Lolita (1955)
According to Stacy Schiff's life of Vera Nabokov, she prevented her husband Vladimir from burning the manuscript of his scandalous novel several times during its gestation.

Dead Cert (1962)
Officially, his wife Mary was Dick Francis's researcher and helped with editing. But Graham Lord's life of the ex-jockey claims she admitted to being his ghost-writer.

Carrie (1974)
After writing Carrie's opening shower scene in their trailer home, Stephen King threw it in the bin, from where his wife Tabitha rescued it – and King expanded it into his debut novel.

Slow Learner (1984)
After an 11-year silence, Thomas Pynchon restarted his career with this collection: a semi-resurrection widely credited to his agent, girlfriend and later wife Melanie Jackson, as was the more significant appearance in 1990 of Vineland, his first novel since 1973's Gravity's Rainbow.

 

 

EM

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