Literary partnerships

When writers live together, by Lesley McDowell in The Independent.

Leonard Woolf recorded his regret about the influence Middleton Murry had on Katherine Mansfield's writing: "She got enmeshed in the sticky sentimentality of Murry and wrote against the grain of her own nature", and for most of the 10 years she spent with Wells, West got very little writing completed. Yet in general, their literary partnerships seem to have served these women writers well. Middlebrook notes that the intrusion of [Ted] Hughes's language in [Sylvia] Plath's writing improved her poetry, and [Martha] Gellhorn's letters to [Ernest] Hemingway show a more masculine, hardy tone, one that seems to have stood her in good stead for war reporting.