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After great pain, a formal feeling comes.
Writing memoirs provides a chance to relive times of happiness and hope, aspiration and success, to feel nostalgia and recreate vanished characters and milieus. The writer also seeks to understand the past, to recreate the context of a life, to describe failure, sadness and pain. To record a life shared with a famous and revered writer, a literary widow must satisfy the curiosity of the public. She has to set her own life in the background and keep the focus on her subject. He is the star, she is the supporting role—in more senses than one. If, as Delmore Schwartz maintains, “All poets' wives have rotten lives,” the widows of great writers have retaliated with revealing and sometimes caustic memoirs about their late husbands (Simpson, 1982, p. 31).
These eleven memoirs, published between 1926 and 2010, range from adoring to bitter. Their major themes are the conflicts in marriage, the struggle for dominance and submission, the suffering from infidelity and alcoholism, the expression of resentment and anger. They all define themselves in relation to their husbands, yet need to break away, regain their own identity and tell their own story. Some emphasize the writer's personal faults at the expense of his artistic achievement, and their literary efforts were inevitably criticized by reviewers for exploiting the author's name or for failing to recognize his artistic value. The best memoirs—by Frieda Lawrence, Eileen Simpson and Claire Bloom—have style, insight and compassion.
Jessie Conrad's two memoirs, Joseph Conrad As I Knew Him (1926) and Joseph Conrad and His Circle (1935) show an intimate knowledge of Conrad as a man, but little grasp of his creative and intellectual life. Conrad had led a lonely and introspective