Writer's envy—do others suffer from this too?




Dear Literary Ladies,
I suffer terribly from writer’s envy, constantly comparing myself with contemporaries, measuring my meager accomplishments against their more substantial successes. Do well-known authors like you still experience professional jealousy, and if so, to whom do you obsessively compare yourself?


It has taken me a long time to scribble some forty volumes. So many hours stolen from traveling, idleness, reading, even from healthy feminine stylishness! How the devil did George Sand manage? That sturdy woman of letters found it possible to finish one novel and start another in the same hour. And she did not thereby lose either a lover or a puff of the narghile [hookah], not to mention a Story of My Life in twenty volumes, and I am overcome by astonishment. Forcefully, she managed her work, her recoverable sorrows, and her limited pleasures.

— Colette, The Evening Star, 1946

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Wouldn't you love to get advice from  classic women authors on writing and the writer's life? Here I fancifully pose the questions, and the Literary Ladies answer in their own words.

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