Behind....

There is an article in the Guardian today, that is quite interesting, entitled, Behind every Great Male Writer...The story starts with the fact that Dan Brown-author of Da Vinci Code-stated that his wife helped him in the writing of the book. "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 complex reference books, marking up key passages, and crisscrossing the internet in search of information that might help her husband." The article goes on to list the number of male authors that have admitted that their wives helped them in the writing procedure,Wordsworth, Nabokov, Carlyle, and, Dick Francis, to name but a few.
It is quite obvious that the personal life of authors is very important for them to be able to write well. Some of wives didnt so much help with the writing or research but they were the ones who made sure that household were running smoothly, "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," aw they stood between their husbands and the fans, or media.
Not all wives, though, have been content to take such a docile back seat: Jane Carlyle, an intellectual and charismatic woman in her own right, found herself having to keep the "bores" and fans away from her husband Thomas as he wrote out his research. According to Professor Rosemary Ashton, Jane "became increasingly bitter and resentful of this role, though obviously it hugely helped her husband".
Other authors, Ted Hughes, Fitzgerald, DH Lawrence, used their wives-and the problems of marriage or their high-strung wives-to write. In the case of Hughes, his wife the GREAT Sylivia Plath, played a huge role in what he wrote in his poetry.
This all goes to show much a role women have been playing behind the scenes in the success of their husbands, the wives, sisters, daughters, end up being the author's typist, proofreader, editor, agent, business manager, chauffeur and, somewhat intriguingly, the person who would cuts up the food for them at every meal.
Without a doubt the most extreme example of this sort of arrangement, is that of Henry Gauthier-Villars. He was a hugely 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 young wife, Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, who Gauthier-Villars would lock in a room until she had written the requisite number of pages. She soon divorced her husband and became a celebrated author in her own right of books.
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, due to their marriage not being legitimate.