FAR MORE THAN Friedl Benedikt or Iris Murdoch, let alone Kathleen Raine, Veza reacted not only to her husband's personality but also to his writing and ideas. In turn she exerted a more profound influence on him than any of his literary girlfriends or pupil/mistresses. While he put her into his fiction and drama before he made her a major character in his autobiography, her ideas (on the psychology and ethics of sight, ogres, the hunt, physical disability, the life of animals, cinema, even sexual equality) fed into his work. Their relationship went through phases of partnership, conflict, reconciliation, and renewed partnership. In Vienna they responded to the same set of cultural and political circumstances and worked in parallel and as equals on their independent projects. Their writings also constitute part of a remarkable private dialogue.

Canetti's creative partnerships with other writers or artists took numerous forms. If Murdoch and Benedikt were literary girlfriends, then Veza was his literary mother. In her letters to Georg, she calls both Elias and the younger Georg Canetti her “sons”; and she mothers both of them in terms of their physical well-being and their professional ambitions. A good mother traditionally puts the interests of her children before her own, and Veza appears to have been a very good mother in this respect. In both her prewar letters to Georg and her more numerous postwar ones, she devotes at least twenty times more attention to Canetti's literary aspirations than to her own, which often appear as afterthoughts when she mentions them at all.