Wife Week
The subgenre promises to do good by training the spotlight on long-overshadowed women.
Is it really that simple?
Its all rather bleak, as Ciuraru puts it.
Their covers often show faceless women, headless women, women from behind.
they seem to want you to ask, maybe while mentally grafting your own head onto the pictures.
What is the point of these books, and why do we keep making it?
Some are great and some are boring.
Some are unreadable shlock.
The trend is not new.Veraby Stacy Schiff, about the archetype-setting Vera Nabokov, won a Pulitzer in 2000.
Francoise GilotsLife With Picassowas published as far back as 1989.
One idea persists: Great men are rarely good guys.
But there is also an element of correcting the record.
(Feminism: We did it!)
Orwell was demanding, tubercular, chronically unfaithful.
But in her attempt to give Eileen her due, Funder sometimes stretches.
The main source for the narrative is just six recently discovered letters Eileen wrote to her friend Norah.
While this is entertaining, it veers close to pure fabrication.
A problem with breathing life into marginalized figures is that theres often not much information about them.
Still, correcting the factual record is a valid aim.
But then what of the novels?
Certainly not the readers themselves, who, again, as predominantly women, already know this.
Perhaps the impetus of Newmans book is simply that Julia is not central in Orwells novel.
She is flat, not fully formed.
In any case, the book, which was sanctioned by the Orwell estate, is excellent and absorbing.
Questions of what its doing and whether it earns its premise fall away in the face of its quality.
Newman shows us, with impressive invention, and even humor, how women suffer uniquely under oppression.
Her version made me wonder if these books need to reach for a corrective angle at all.
The dismissal of the monster Scylla as a bit shrill?)
are corrected by Madeline MillersCirce.
The impulse is noble, but these dont make sense as one-for-one transactions.
Even the idea of assessing the work of a poet from roughly the eighth century B.C.E.
this way is pretty funny.
The problem with writing about wives is writing about wives.
These books define their female subjects in relation to men.
Theres a limit to how feminist a project can be with a man at its core.
With this in mind, the most interesting book I read on this topic was Catherine LaceysBiography of X.
The book is a meta construction, a biography narrated by the wife of a fictional famous artist.
Some parts are familiar.
Does the famous wife wrong, abuse, and otherwise trammel the unfamous wife?
These days, wives can be wives to wives.