Tag: biography

Book review: Artists, Siblings, Visionaries by Judith Mackrell

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Judith Mackrell dives into the early lives of artist siblings Gwen and Augustus (Gus) John in her biography Artists, Sibling, Visionaries. It’s a wild ride. Set in early 20th century Britain, the artists are both socially awkward but John lived a notoriously bohemian life. He was an adulterer and bigamist who fathered a large number of children with multiple women. There were so many he seemed to lose track of them himself. In contrast, Gwen was an introvert. She was bisexual, fiercely independent, quiet and deeply private. 

People are like shadows to me and I am like a shadow.

Growing up in Wales, the siblings had an inner turbulence in common. They attended the Slade School of Fine Art in London in the 1890s, the first art school to admit women. Later, Gus lived in England while Gwen settled in Paris. 

Gwen and Gus had once thought that money was irrelevant. As students, they’d believed that all they needed was a roof over their heads, materials with which to paint—and their freedom.

Initially Augustus appeared to be the rising star. This was possibly in large part because he was an outgoing and handsome young man in a man’s world. However, his life became so complex that art often took a back seat. It was the shy introverted Gwen who was (posthumously) recognised as the greater painter of the two.

Even now, at twenty-one, Gwen had no control of her own money; as an unmarried woman, she was barred from opening a bank account.

Gwen was the muse and lover of Rodin, 36 years her senior. The relationship was a source of both pain and joy for Gwen and the most significant of her life. It was only after converting to Catholicism she was able to break free of the hold Rodin had over her. Her subsequent, largely solitary, existence in life was marked by a fierce loyalty to her art.

In 50 years’ time I will be known as the brother of Gwen John.

The creative struggle and its tension with commerce are alive throughout Artists, Siblings, Visionaries. The bond and rivalry of siblings pursuing the same profession was also a strong theme. The book focuses centrally on Gwen’s struggle to live a creative life, often relying on her brother for financial support. It highlights how constrained the world was for women of the times. This created tension throughout the book. In Artists, Siblings, Visionaries, Mackrell makes the humans behind the artwork visible with all their dreams, fears, and flaws. It was wonderful to read.

Book review: Wifedom by Anna Funder

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Who hasn’t read, or at least heard of George Orwell’s Animal Farm or Nineteen Eighty-Four? I still have images in my head of Old Major calling his friends together to overthrow the humans, and of Winston being tortured by the thought police. I can sense you all nodding, but do you know who Eileen O’Shaughnessy was? I didn’t.

Orwell’s work was essential in this task. It was a joy, even, revisiting his writing on the systems of tyranny ‘with theft as their aim’, and the ‘vast system of mental cheating’ that is doublethink. It was his insight… that allowed me to see how men can imagine themselves innocent in a system that benefits them, at others’ cost… But his insight into the rapacity of power… never extended to relations between the sexes. Orwell stayed blind to the position of women, though he’d been buying girls for a few rupees a time.

Eileen, Oxford graduate, the woman who gave up her own ambitions to enable Orwell’s work was almost erased from history, that is until Anna Funder discovered her and wrote Wifedom. Orwell biographers barely make a reference to Eileen. And while Orwell referred to his ‘wife’ on occasion in his writing (37 times to be precise according to Funder), it was never by name, and he never mentioned her feats of bravery or her contributions – perhaps because they might have outshone his own.

Eric had decided that he mustn’t let his work be interrupted & complained bitterly when we’d been married a week that he’s only done two good days’ work out of seven.

Eileen ran their farm and raised their adopted child so he could write, cared for him when wounded and sick, visited Orwell on the front, worked at the headquarters of the Independent Labour party in Barcelona during the war, protected him from arrest, and typed up and saved his manuscripts all whilst under the gaze of communist spies.

Eileen knows her life is riddled with spies but feels she can manage it.

Memoir, fiction and fact swirl through the pages of Wifedom, as Eileen is pieced together and rescued from patriarchal erasure by Funder through fragments of facts and six letters written by Eileen to her friend Norah Myles. I found Wifedom to be a compelling read and feel a need to revisit it already.