Nell’s Reviews > Wifedom: Mrs. Orwell's Invisible Life > Status Update

Lydia leaps into the eternal female doublethink, which is automatically to see things, including oneself, from the man’s point of view.. It would be humourless of her to ‘treat the incident as a serious matter’. She’s trapped in a way she can’t articulate that makes it.. easier to kiss her beloved friend’s sick husband than not to, though she knows the kiss is a betrayal.. and possibly, the kiss of death.

“In this fiction, the vanishing trick has two main purposes. The first is to make what she does disappear (so he can appear to have done it all, alone). The second is to make what he does to a woman disappear (so he can be innocent). This trick is the dark, doublethinking heart of patriarchy.”

You might think that, as privileged women in professions, we'd have the tools to liberate ourselves. But we don't, or at any rate we haven't… This is a story I tell against myself… the system that made this self, as well as my husband's, and put her into his service.

Wifedom is a wicked magic trick we have learned to play on ourselves. I want to expose how it is done and so take its wicked, tricking power away.

“Eileen could distil herself and others, human and animal, into characters with lives – and therefore plots – of their own… But this ability to imagine yourself into the skin of another can be an openness to the other so radical it leaves you unprotected; it can be a sign of someone who may not even be on their own side.”