Matthew Kelly

The Bedford Hotel is the proper place to mark significant moments in the history of my maternal family. I think this has now passed, alas.

Easy to overdo the historical comparison, but pope as a national figure & counterweight to political regime recalls JP II and Poland under communism.

You’re welcome! Also, I’ve looked at POW held at the Dartmoor depot in my Quartz & Feldspar (2015/6), which might also provide some helpful context. Great subject. Lots to do.

Guessing you know Renaud Morieux’s The Society of Prisoners: Anglo-French Wars and Incarceration in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford University Press, Past & Present Series, 2019)?

Chimney at Didcot Power Station, photographed by Martyn J Bull.

"I thought of how, as a child, I’d used pylons to calculate distance & time, and how they seemed to anchor space. I thought of how the turbines resisted this, how unmeasurable they seemed, in a nightscape with few visual referents."

'Landscapes of Power'
longbarrowpress.substack.com/p/landscapes...

I deleted for I saw you‘d already answered this.

Yes, point taken. Some of Orwell‘s behaviour goes beyond what patriarchy nominally permits. I think Funder allows the reader to see that, but doesn‘t assert a hard border between the two, for part of patriarchy’s power—arguably—lies in that uncertainty.

Inside the Roman Catholic chapel at Biddlestone in Northumberland is an intriguing remnant from life on the home front during the Second World War.

1/6

Anna Funder’s book Wifedom. Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life (2023).

Thought Anna Funder’s Wifedom brilliant. Perhaps the most effective dissection of patriarchy I’ve read. Here’s some reasons why I liked it as a historian.

Correction: In some ways, Funder’s engagement with Orwell’s biographers, whom she treats respectfully throughout, is the most important part of the book. She shows how their resort to the passive voice, evasive language, and wishful thinking obscure both Eileen‘s labour & Orwell’s sexual behaviour.

Finally, Eileen‘s last letters to Orwell are truly upsetting. By and large, Funder allows them to speak for themselves, and they do. Men should read this book.

Wifedom should make us read biographies differently, more sensitive especially to the representation of women, and especially wives.

First, the central role played by Eileen’s labour, both paid and domestic which made Orwell’s work possible. Second, sanitising his sexual behaviour, especially their uncritical acceptance of his account of Eileen’s point of view, such as her supposed acceptance of an open marriage.

In some ways, Funder’s engagement with Orwell’s biographers, whom she treats respectfully throughout, is the most important part of the book. She shows how their resort to the passive voice, evasive language, and wishful thinking demonstrate two things.

Her agency is systematically written out of Homage, Orwell repeatedly resorting to the passive voice to account for crucial and—to repeat—courageous role she played.

In a set of virtuoso chapters about Eileen’s role in the Spanish Civil War, Funder exposes Orwell’s erasure of her activism, bravery, & centrality to the experiences he describes in Homage to Catalonia. Now hard to imagine a meaningful reading of Homage that doesn’t take account of Funder.

But what’s really brilliant about Wifedom is how Funder shows Orwell‘s patriarchy to be manifest in his works and reproduced by his biographers, both rendering Eileen Blair invisible.

Funder relates Orwell’s behaviour, particularly his basic assumption that he was to be looked after by a wife, to her own life as a writer, wife and mother. Wifedom gave Orwell what a writer ‘needs’, and some think they’re entitled to, another patriarchal provision.

Another way of putting it, she shows how his behaviour, often inexcusable & subject to criticism at the time, still fell within permissible boundaries, boundaries that Funder argues underpinned patriarchy.

Funder loves Orwell’s work. And working on the life of his ‘invisible’ wife & Orwell’s treatment women, inc. his appalling sexual behaviour, doesn’t change this. Rather than exceptionalising Orwell, tho he is undoubtedly odd, he is treated as shaped by the patriarchal mores of his time.

Anna Funder’s book Wifedom. Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life (2023).

Thought Anna Funder’s Wifedom brilliant. Perhaps the most effective dissection of patriarchy I’ve read. Here’s some reasons why I liked it as a historian.

If Labour want a fairer society, they must argue for it Labour must make the political argument: taxes are the critical downpayment we all pay to live in a fairer society.  It now seems all but certain that direct taxes will rise in the forthcoming Budget...

Breaking the tax pledge is the right call...and politically sulphurous. Reeves must argue, far more forcefully, that taxes are *the* essential downpayment we all pay for a fairer society.

Patrick Diamond and I wrote for @renewaljournal.bsky.social. Key points in 🧵 👇

renewal.org.uk/blog/if-labo...

What's the German word for the joy one feels when a friend publishes a book?

Labour needs to stop fooling itself and lean in to the political logic of its choices. It is a high taxing, high spending government. www.ft.com/content/00a5...

so funny I spat out my coffee / cornflakes as I went to get popcorn

This👆

I remember feeling touched by this act of solidarity. Just a few short steps from being the Mamdani of Exeter. If only I‘d realised.

A supporter nicked a Labour banner from a front garden near the school. They thought nothing of it, I found it a bit unnerving. Moment when the sensitivities of the lower middle-class boy & the boy from the estate met in a political alliance but with unresolved questions of tactics & strategy.

Just something historians of Ireland very sensitised to, though saying UK a Good Thing given signals Britain doesn’t technically include Ireland even under the Union, though British as a descriptor- the British Government - a can of worms that most ‘British’ historians don’t worry about enough!

Sorry to pedantic, but as you’ll know, Ireland isn’t outside the UK in 1909.