George Orwell's wife

[ArabeIIaScott]

Article by the author of a new book on Orwell's wife, out in August. Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life by Anna Funder.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/jul/30/my-hunt-for-eileen-george-orwell-erased-wife-anna-funder

'No character can come to life without a name. But from a wife, which is a job description, all can be stolen.'

'the methods of omission ... fascinated me. When women can’t be left out, they are doubted, trivialised, or reduced to footnotes in eight-point type. Other times, chronology is manipulated to conceal. But the most insidious way the actions of women are omitted is by using the passive voice.'

'We think we’ve come a long way in 80 years, but statistically, there is an irrefutable, globally intransigent heterosexual norm that pervades across ethnicity, colour and class. Nowhere in the world do women have the same power, freedom, leisure or money as their male partners. Every society is built on the unpaid or underpaid work of women, an estimated $10.9tn (£8.5tn) of it a year. But to pay would be to redistribute wealth and power in a way that might defund and defang patriarchy.'

I see your Edwardina and raise you Jamesina and Johnina...

Just listening to Desert Island Discs. The castaway is Shirley Collins, a great folk singer. Following up on links, I see the following and thought it would fit right in here.

... the young Collins threw herself into folk singing. She met the song collector Alan Lomax at a party, who would become her first husband and the two of them travelled to America to make field recordings from communities in the Deep South. In a staggering feat of airbrushing from history (something of a theme in her story), Lomax’s memoirs mention her key involvement with only the sentence “Shirley Collins came along for the trip too.”

https://drownedinsound.com/in_depth/4151828-i-wished-i-d-let-myself-get-angry-more---dis-meets-shirley-collins

When I was doing family tree research, I came across many unusual Ina names in the course of my trawling. Most came up in the years following WW1 and the lassies were obviously named after male relatives who fell. Most unusual I can think of at the moment were Jacobina and Samuelina.

Ina is quite unusual for babies now but there's a fair few older ladies with it.

@Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g It does fit. Shameful

Subject of a Guardian editorial

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/aug/06/the-guardian-view-on-invisible-women-cancelled-by-history-restored-with-care