Certainly, and obviously, an author's personal life contributes to his work and sometimes a wife's contribution has simply been to smooth the life around her husband as much as possible, clearing the way for him to work, undisturbed, as Jessie (wife of Joseph) Conrad did, ditto Nora Joyce. Both of them, according to Jeffrey Meyers in his book Married to Genius, provided a kind of stability for their highly strung husbands.

Not all wives, though, have been content to take such a docile back seat: Jane Carlyle, an intellectual and charismatic woman in her own right, found herself having to keep the "bores" (ie Americans) and fans away from her husband Thomas as he wrested out another dense tract in his study. According to Professor Rosemary Ashton, author of Thomas and Jane Carlyle, Jane "became increasingly bitter and resentful of this role, though obviously it hugely helped her husband".

Other authors have used their marriages (usually the problems therein and, even more commonly, their problematic wives) for direct literary inspiration - F Scott Fitzgerald and DH Lawrence spring to mind. Ted Hughes could certainly be included in the latter group and some have suggested that Sylvia Plath had a secret, if crucial, role in the actual writing of Hughes' poems - though this may be wishful thinking on the part of Plathians.

Brown's evocation of his working relationship with his wife is reminiscent of an altogether different kind of literary relationship, however; one that brings to mind antiquated images of the loud, famous, egocentric man getting all the credit while his quiet mouse of a wife slaves away upstairs. "I think [this set-up] goes back to the old model of pre-industrial labour," says the author Kathryn Hughes. "The man was the front person - the baker, the jeweller, the pharmacist - and the wives and sisters and daughters did the accounts, made the dough and dealt with the customers. Thus women's work was always vital to the enterprise but wasn't necessarily recognised as separate from her husband's."

Nabokov is probably the most illustrious example of this type. His wife, Vera, was his typist, proofreader, editor, agent, business manager, chauffeur and, somewhat intriguingly, the person who would cut up his food for him at every meal.

Vera was not, however, his bedmate, according to Nabokov's biographer, Brian Boyd - in this one activity, the author preferred to go it alone.

Wordsworth is another well-known example, relying on his sister, his wife and his sister-in-law to write out his manuscripts. Some have argued that his sister, Dorothy, did more than just write out manuscripts and in fact had a direct impact on them. He certainly used her journals for inspiration.

For years, it was rumoured that Dick Francis's wife Mary was the true author of the horse-heavy novels. Both always denied it but Francis was always keen to give his wife credit: "If it wasn't for her I wouldn't have written the stories. She had an English degree and she used to correct my writing, my spelling," he once said in an interview. "[The rumours] didn't irritate us. We thought, what the hell!"

Brown and Francis both write the kind of books in which plot is everything. Employing your wife as your research assistant means there are no worries that your research assistant is going to run off and write a "spoiler" of her own. "The old model of the incorporated wife thus works particularly well here," muses Hughes. Since Mary's death in 2000, Francis has not written any new works.

Without a doubt the most extreme example of this sort of arrangement, however, is that of Henry Gauthier-Villars. He was a hugely famous French critic in the early part of the 20th century. His most famous work was probably the Claudine series, which he published under his pseudonym, Willy. These turned out to have actually been written by his young wife, Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, who Gauthier-Villars would lock in a room until she had written the requisite number of pages. Somewhat understandably, Sidonie-Gabrielle soon divorced her husband and became a celebrated author in her own right of books which she published under her surname, Colette.

Of course, in the matter of giving credit where credit is due, the balance does occasionally shift to the opposite extreme. John Stuart Mill, for example, gave his wife Harriet effusive credit where probably little was due. This was primarily, Ashton suggests, out of shocked gratitude that he had at last found a woman who had taken a fancy to him. Mill happily proclaimed to all and sundry that his work owed everything to this intellectually and morally superior being and that all of his ideas came from her. His dedication to her memory in On Liberty is as memorable for its hyperbole as it is for its unique attitude: "Were I but capable of interpreting to the world one half the great thoughts and noble feelings which are buried in her grave, I should be the medium of a greater benefit to it, than is ever likely to arise from anything that I can write, unprompted and unassisted by her all but unrivalled wisdom." Modern day scholars, however, somewhat doubt that Mill owed quite that much to his wife because, Ashton says, "We have plenty of evidence from his work before he met her that he had many ideas of his own."

Occasionally, too, it is husbands who have provided support to their writing wives. Leonard Woolf is widely credited for creating a sufficiently comforting atmosphere in which his wife Virginia could, occasionally, find enough solace to write. GH Lewes also used to fetch books for his wife, George Eliot, from the libraries as she feared being sneered at outside, due to their marriage not being legitimate.

One mustn't leave out even less conventional arrangements. Gertrude Stein, for example, owed much to her lover, Alice B Toklas, albeit in a very different way from those mentioned above. Instead of merely pushing her off to the library to do research, Stein took her lover's persona and merrily wrote, with fond tongue palpably in cheek, The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas. The book has Alice saying the line: "I may say that only three times in my life have I met a genius." One of these geniuses, funnily enough, turns out to be Stein.