Literary Couplings: Writing Couples, Collaborators, and the Construction of Authorship

Contents

Contents Acknowledgments ix Prologue: Signs of the Times: Five Snapshots of Contemporary Authorship xi Contexts and Heterotexts: A Theoretical and Historical Introduction 3      I. Early Modern “Coupled Worke” “Warpe” and “Webb” in the Sidney Psalms: The “Coupled Worke” of the Countess of Pembroke and Sir Philip Sidney 41   Constructing an Adventure and Negotiating for Narrative Control: Johnson and Boswell in the Hebrides 59  .  II. Romantic Joint Labor Editing Minervas: William Godwin’s Liminal Maneuvers in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Wrongs of Woman 81   Home at Grasmere Again: Revising the Family in Dove Cottage 100  .  v “The Body of My Father’s Writings”: Sara Coleridge’s Genial Labor 124   III. Victorian Complementarities and Crosscurrents “Singing Song for Song”: The Brownings “in the Poetic Relation” 151      Collaboration and Collusion: Two Victorian Writing Couples and Their Orientalist Texts 175   “An Uninterrupted Current”: Homoeroticism and Collaborative Authorship in Teleny 193      IV. Literary Modernity: Mythmakers and Muses Courting the Muse: Dorothy Wellesley and W. B. Yeats 211   Not Elizabeth to His Ralegh: Laura Riding, Robert Graves, and the Origins of the White Goddess 229   V. Writing Back: Postcolonial and Contemporary Contestation and Retrospection Competing Versions of a Love Story: Mircea Eliade and Maitreyi Devi 243   “Your Sentence Was Mine Too”: Reading Sylvia Plath in Ted Hughes’s Birthday Letters 260   Crowding the Garret: Women’s Collaborative Writing and the Problematics of Space 288   Taking Joint Stock: A Critical Survey of Scholarship on Literary Couples and Collaboration 309      vi Contents Bibliography 335 Contributors 361 Index 365 Contents vii ...