Women in the Margins | Breadwinner, Typist, Editor, Wife
Recently, while cleaning out the attic, my mom came across a box of my dad’s old science fiction paperbacks from when he was a teenager. She dropped them on my bed with a perfunctory, “Here. See what you want to keep, and we’ll toss the rest.”
From that trove of vivid, ‘80s mass-market camp, what I liked most of all was my father’s 1985 Bantam Spectra edition of Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles, a book I had recently purchased and read on my own, not knowing there was already a copy tucked away in storage.
I laid the two books, his and mine, out next to each other—separated 30 years in time, yet only an inch in space. It amused me that we’d have been around the same age when we read them, that despite everything we had the same taste.
But I noticed something interesting as I flipped through my dad’s copy. Reading my own, a 2011 Harper Perennial Modern Classics, I’d rather liked the dedication, which reads as follows:
With love and gratitude,
to Maggie/Marguerite,
who typed this manuscript
way back in 1949.
The 1985 edition, however, read simply, “For my wife MARGUERITE with all my love.”
I wondered what had changed, between 1985 and 2011, that had convinced Bradbury to expand that declaration of love into an acknowledgement of his wife’s untold hours of unpaid labor that quite literally made his career possible. That acknowledgment was a good choice, I thought—a humble one. I wondered how many of our most revered literary figures, through arrogance or sheer blindness, had never thought to make it.
According to the obituary granted her by the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA), Marguerite “Maggie” McClure was born in 1922. What follows is a 24-year information vacuum in the internet record of Maggie’s life that resumes only upon her meeting Bradbury in 1946 at the Los Angeles bookstore where she worked. The oft-cited story is that McClure suspected Bradbury of shoplifting. He responded by asking her out for coffee. “I’m going to the moon someday,” he told her. “Wanna come?” They married not long after.
In addition to typing his manuscripts, McClure, who had an English degree from UCLA, is said to have corrected the grammar in Bradbury’s stories. In the early days of Ray’s career, she was the household’s primary breadwinner, working as a bookseller and then as a secretary to an advertising director. Bradbury called their relationship “one of the early liberated marriages.” Bradbury, who could not drive, stayed home to write, clean the apartment, and prepare dinner.
Nowhere is Maggie Bradbury’s story told for its own sake. Even in her obituaries, she is first and foremost Ray’s wife. Perhaps this is the inevitable plight of the fame-adjacent, to go down in history as the wife of.
Of this I am almost certain: Without Maggie to pay the rent, to type the manuscripts, to labor over the copyedits, there would be no Ray Bradbury as we know him. There would be no Dandelion Wine or Something Wicked This Way Comes or Fahrenheit 451 paperbacks crumpled in the bottom of every tenth grader’s backpack. Behind the man who wrote the words, here is a woman who for years performed the unspoken labor that allowed those words to exist. In some ways, it seems she is just as much a part of Ray Bradbury (the author) as is Ray Bradbury (the man).
Might she herself have wanted to be a writer? She, who had pursued an English degree, who worked at a bookstore? What might she have given up in support of her husband’s career? What might she have been?
This is not to strip Maggie Bradbury of her agency. Rid the world of its misogyny, and she might still have dedicated just as much of herself to supporting Ray’s art. I do not imagine them as a ham-fisted Hollywood parable, the domineering artist husband and his meek, subservient wife. What bothers me is that we can’t know the whole of it. If there are, as I suspect, a great many Maggie Bradburys hidden in the fabric of our literary history and present, then surely many of them have sacrificed a great deal in their husbands’ names.
How many breadwinners, typists, editors, and wives have we lost to the great machine of history?
Sources Consulted: