✍️The Greats

Her surviving diary records that when The Tale of Genji was read aloud to Emperor Ichijō, he remarked that its author must have read the official Chronicles of Japan — histories in Chinese, a language considered improper for women — and courtiers mockingly nicknamed her "Our Lady of the Chronicles." She writes that she then hid her Chinese learning, even from her own household, while privately tutoring the Empress in Chinese poetry behind screens.

In 1824, when Dickens was twelve, his father was imprisoned for debt in the Marshalsea and the boy was sent to paste labels on bottles at Warren's blacking warehouse for six shillings a week. He told no one for the rest of his life — not his wife or children — confiding it only in a fragment given to his friend John Forster, published after his death. The blacking factory resurfaces everywhere in the fiction, most directly in David Copperfield.

In 1866, trapped by a predatory contract with the publisher Stellovsky — miss the November deadline and Stellovsky would own the rights to everything he wrote for nine years — Dostoevsky hired a 20-year-old stenographer, Anna Snitkina, and dictated an entire novel, The Gambler, in twenty-six days, delivering it with hours to spare while simultaneously writing Crime and Punishment. He married Anna four months later, and she ran his finances, and his gambling, for the rest of his life.

In 1917 Virginia and Leonard Woolf bought a small hand press for about £19, taught themselves typesetting at their dining table, and founded the Hogarth Press with a 150-copy pamphlet of their own stories. The press went on to hand-set T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land — Virginia composed the type herself in 1923 — and to publish Freud in English. She noted the deeper point in her diary: she had become the only woman in England free to write whatever she liked, because she owned the means of publishing it.

He wrote the novel over about eighteen months in Mexico City, not earning, while his wife Mercedes negotiated credit with the butcher and landlord and pawned household goods. When the typescript was finished, the couple could not afford the roughly 82 pesos of postage to mail it to Editorial Sudamericana in Buenos Aires — so, as García Márquez told it, they sent half for the pesos they had (by most tellings, accidentally the second half), then pawned the heater and her hair dryer to post the rest. The 8,000-copy first printing sold out in weeks.

Morrison wrote her first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970), in the hours around a full-time job: a single mother of two sons, she rose at four in the morning to write before commuting to her editing desk at Random House, and published it at thirty-nine. She kept the pre-dawn shift for the rest of her career, explaining that she had discovered she was smarter before sunrise — the writing got the best hours, and the job got what remained.

In 1957 Achebe mailed the sole handwritten manuscript of Things Fall Apart from Lagos to a London typing agency he had seen advertised, with the fee enclosed. Months of silence followed: the agency had simply shelved it. Only when his colleague at the Nigerian Broadcasting Service, Angela Beattie, visited the office in person on her London leave and demanded action was the typescript made and returned. Had the package stayed lost, he later said, there was no copy — the book, and arguably a literature, hung on that errand. Heinemann's cautious first printing in 1958 was 2,000 hardbacks.