Nine 20th Century Women Writers and Their Famous Literary Partnerships. Why did a gifted writer like Sylvia Plath stumble into a marriage that drove her to suicide? Why did Hilda Doolittle want to marry Ezra Pound when she was attracted to women? Why did Simone DeBeauvoir pimp for Jean-Paul Sartre? The story of each of these relationships between female writers and their male literary partners is far from straightforward, but each relationship provokes the same question: would these women have become the writers they did without the experience of their own particular literary relationship?