María Lejárraga was born in Spain in 1874. She wanted to be a writer but . . . she was born in Spain in 1874, so she got married instead. As all writers, though, she couldn’t help herself and went on writing. Her lazy layabout husband who couldn’t write worth a damn published her plays under his name.
The plays became famous, and the loser husband started his own theater company in order to get actresses to sleep with him in exchange for parts. The arrangement worked: Lejárraga wrote, the husband has his own harem of actresses plus international fame (the plays were even used in Hollywood), and starlets knew what to do to get parts.
Finally, the husband settled down with one leading actress and started an illegitimate family with her. The actress wasn’t happy because having children out of wedlock wasn’t super prestigious back then but she knew he couldn’t leave Lejárraga. The fellow couldn’t write a postcard to an ailing grandma without her help, let alone a play.
Lejárraga, in the meanwhile, kept reading, writing, and thinking. Eventually, she realized that something wasn’t right in the arrangement where she did all the writing but the only fame she got was that of an idiot wife cheated on very publicly.
Lejárraga started writing passionate feminist treatises about the exploitation of women, and the loser husband went on signing them.
It is only in the 1950s, years after the husband’s death, that Lejárraga wrote an autobiography admitting her authorship. There were people who tried to deny it but it was useless because everybody in the theater had known plus the husband himself had admitted he couldn’t write.
Clarissa's Blog 