Unforgettable Life Lessons From 5 of History's Smartest Female Writers

Carl Bernstein should have known that cheating on Nora Ephron would earn him infamy on the page. Ephron's parents were Hollywood screenwriters; "everything is copy" was a family creed. Oh, but how angry he was when Ephron's first and only novel, Heartburn, became a giant bestseller! (So angry, in fact, that he demanded oversight on the subsequent screenplay.) Yet the last laugh is Ephron's, as was her wont. Heartburn made her rich, but it also did much more: it made her the hero of the story, "rather than the victim of a joke."

Thank to her 1964 essay "Notes on Camp," Sontag became one of the 1960s literary It girls. But creating and maintaining an image comes at a cost, and Sontag was ambivalent about her status as a celebrity, as only those who have it can be. "It follows you around mercilessly," she told an interviewer, "awkward, useless, essentially unrelated to the self."

Even before West had established her reputation as one of Britain's preeminent journalists and critics, she had few reservations about rattling the literary establishment. In a 1912 review, the young West called the already-lionized H.G. Wells "the Old Maid among novelists"; Wells, in lieu of pouting, invited West to tea. Soon the two embarked on an affair that would produce both a son and soap-operatic drama, the latter of which ended only when West tired of Wells's ego and took off for America.