Heroines

by Kate Zambreno

lolling around hungover from the night before. And yet she still found time to write. Sylvia waking at four a.m., to be writer before wife. Typing up Ted’s poems. They were their husband’s secretaries, like Viv was to Tom. Yes, their husbands were more supportive of their wives as writers for the most part than the generation before (barring the Paul Bowles and Leonard Woolfs), Edmund Wilson locking Mary into a room to make her write the stories that would make her debut collection, but these wives were still expected to be the good wife and mother as well. Even Hardwick admits in her essay on Plath that being a mother meant one had to devote one’s energy to raising children in the first couple of years, not writing. I think her general attitude has to do with the philosophy of the time that to be a feminist was to complain. “People with a real gift for writing find the time, people with no talent complain all the time,” she once said.