Typing for Love or Money: The Hidden Labor Behind Modern Literary Masterpieces (opens in new tab)

Given the title and the content, I'm very surprised that there is no mention of Dostoevsky's wife Anna [0]. She was hired as a stenographer on his novel The Gambler to help him to finish it on time, since if he failed to do so, the copyright of any future work of his for the next several years would be in jeopardy. It took a while to find a rhythm (Dostoevsky was hard to keep up with), but once they did, they managed to meet the deadline, and a relationship between them was born.

From her Memoirs:

  Anna describes how Dostoevsky began his marriage proposal by outlining the plot of an imaginary new novel, as if he needed her advice on female psychology. In the story an old painter makes a proposal to a young girl whose name is Anya. Dostoevsky asked if it was possible for a girl so young and different in personality to fall in love with the painter. Anna answered that it was quite possible. Then he told Anna: "Put yourself in her place for a moment. Imagine I am the painter, I confessed to you and asked you to be my wife. What would you answer?" Anna said: "I would answer that I love you and I will love you forever."

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Dostoevskaya

My mother typed up the final draft of Jonathan Livingston Seagull for my father, Richard Bach. She always claimed that she had made editorial adjustments to it, along the way, without his knowledge.

He left her when the book became famous, so we (his children) never knew how much of Mom’s boast to believe.

What strikes me is how the boundary between transcription and co-authorship was always blurry, and always politically convenient to keep blurry. If you call it typing, you don't have to share credit or pay more. If you call it editing, the myth of singular genius gets complicated.

Bosanquet didn't just transcribe James — she learned to anticipate his rhythms, suggest phrasings, shape the final text. That's creative labor by any honest definition. But the typewriter gave everyone a convenient fiction: she's operating a machine, therefore it's mechanical, therefore it doesn't count.

We're watching the same pattern replay right now with a different machine.

Never read an article with so many references to _amaneunsis_ (A word I recall from from TOEFL prep)

Of course , the whole article is about amaneunses and their (often) overlooked, underpaid, or under-appreciated labor.