On the functions of literary collaborations between women

"Collaborative writing, at first glance, would support both these exceptions to professionalism, projecting alternatively an amateur practice (something done for amusement) and an expedient materialism (two can write more efficiently than one) ... Neither explanation, however, fully comprehends these partners’ literary investments. Even the Findlaters, who were reputedly so poor they had to write their first manuscripts on the back of grocers' paper and were in fact supporting themselves and their family by their pens, saw their writing as more than journeymen's labor. These were women, in other words, who did dream of counting themselves as professional authors. Collaboration, I want to argue, facilitated this dream by masking it. For under the guise of collaboration's evident amateurism, a number of women were able to slip into a professional position" ( Bette London, 1999, Writing Double: Women's Literary Partnerships, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 104-105).

"If the literary culture at the turn of the century demanded a single author (if only the single author of individual parts) for writing to be deemed serious, what double writing inevitably achieved was to bring the work of writing into visibility. The very terms that governed public curiosity about these collaborations focused attention, in ways perhaps unprecedented, on the material of writing: on the hands of the author, the control of the pen, the possession of the page, not to mention the mechanics of character and plot construction, the components of a stylistic signature, the art of producing dialogue, the process of revision. Appearing at the very moment when popular writers' guides began to be codify these processes and procedures, literary collaborations could thus be read as a kind of living handbook to the art of fiction."
( Bette London, 1999, Writing Double: Women's Literary Partnerships, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 107).