Priscilla & Eileen(s)

Housekeeping: I interviewed Priya Hein on my channel here. Give it a watch. Also, put together a gift guide with books and trinkets organized by zodiac sign for Paloma Magazine here and a NYRB gift guide here.

In terms of reading… Finished The Girls by John Bowen and have now started Lord Jim at Home by Dinah Brook.* One chapter in, and wow.** Violent, sexual, dirty… There’s a lot to unpack. Also, have to recommend this interview with the author where she reveals why her years at Osho’s ashram altered her writing life:

Below, you will find some thoughts on Priscilla, the film, Eileen, the film, and finally, Eileen, the wife of George Orwell as rendered by Anna Funder.

Priscilla

Having read Priscilla Presley’s memoir Elvis and Me, in anticipation of the film by Sofia Coppola, I was disappointed by Priscilla. It was not a visual treat in the way Marie Antoinette was.*** Nor did the film adequately reveal Priscilla’s inner life. To be fair, the memoir does keep the reader at an arm’s length from Priscilla’s true emotions, but she does reveal juicy details, two affairs, and most importantly, character growth.

And though the film is nearly two hours long, it truncates the marriage of Elvis and Priscilla in the final quarter of the film. These scenes skim the surface of Priscilla’s development as a woman and do not show how she was able to assert her independence from Elvis.

When it comes to style, I enjoyed seeing all of the various sleepwear Priscilla donned. The baby doll dresses and sets ranged from frothy and sweet to provocative and sexy.

I also appreciated the scene of Priscilla applying her makeup before traveling to the hospital to give birth to her daughter, Lisa Marie. It was a reminder to commit to a stylish life. It would behoove us all to do so.****

Eileen

I enjoyed the film. It’s as simple as that. Sure, we miss out on a lot of interiority and some of Eileen’s true weirdness. Most notably, there are no scatological impulses and Eileen does not sit outside Randy’s apartment, pining for him. Neither does she punish herself by pinching her nipples and kicking her legs up into the air in one of the prison’s unused rooms after she does something unseemly. Instead, with deep shadows and neo-noir styling, we see how New England and her father’s domineering rule isolates our titular character until she snaps.*****

To conclude, my glowing review of the film, I want to share this quote from a New England publication, Vermont not Mass, which said, “When the dust settles, we're left with a sordid little yarn that sneakily satirizes the three models of femininity on offer in midcentury America: virgin, vamp and virtuous wife.”

Eileen

Anna Funder’s Wifedom: Mrs. Orwell's Invisible Life fuses biography, memoir, and creative writing to shed light on George Orwell’s first wife: Eileen O’Shaughnessy.

Funder makes the case that Eileen is a causality of the patriarchy. It was her domestic labour alongside her wit, intellect, and empathy which helped shape and sharpen George’s writing. Unfortunately, her influence was erased by George and his subsequent biographers.

Funder spends half of the book reimagining Eileen’s inner life and feelings in a way that I think Eileen probably would have hated. However, Funder excels at giving the women around Eileen and George the space to share their thoughts. We read quotes from their friends and acquaintances that male biographers often do not give full credence to. It is the inclusion of these quotes which make the book a delight. A smattering of quotes can be found below:

• Lettice Cooper, writer and friend to Eileen: “Saw that Orwell had ‘an immense charm that was very difficult to define’, which caused him to be ‘surrounded by adorers, male and female’. Though ‘he was in many ways a very ingenuous and almost stupid man’ (281).

• Edna Bussey, former mentee of Eileen: “I didn’t like the idea of him. I may be very wrong but I have always had the feeling that he didn’t take enough care of her. She should never have died from just a simple operation, nor so young” (339).*****

• Lydia Jackson, friend of Eileen: “Her conscious, undeviating purpose was to help him to fulfill his destiny - that is, to do his writing, to say what he had to say in the way he wanted … His illness made her fix her gaze on him as the most imminently threatened, but it was she who succumbed first” (339).

• Sonia Brownell, Orwell’s second wife, told Lucien Freud, her former paramour: “That she was ‘appalled’, when ‘he started making advances’, and tells another friend it was a ‘disaster’ as he was ‘clumsy’ and ‘had made love to her quickly and without any great show of passion’. “He seemed pleased,” she said, “but I don’t think he was aware that here was not any pleasure in it from me”” (352).

The book is controversial — Funder, when she isn’t including embarrassing details about her personal life and “clever” anecdotes from her children, paints a cruel, yet believable picture of George as a philandering misogynist. However, her scholarship does take a hit once one learns that she got the location of George’s birth wrong. She says he was born in Burma, he was born in India. I wonder if my time would have been better spent reading Sylvia Topp’s Eileen: The Making of George Orwell.

Recent Reads:

• The unedited Kaitlin Phillips gift guide with picks from Merve Emre, Molly Young, and more. My favorite was novelist and lyricist Polly Samson sharing her desire for an Akhal-Teke horse. Such a beautiful animal — supposedly, Alexander the Great’s horse, Bucephalus, is thought to be an Akhal-Teke horse.

• Ten Recommendations from Lydia Davis for Good Writing Habits because who doesn’t need better habits:

  • “Take notes regularly. This will sharpen both your powers of observation and your expressive ability. A productive feedback loop is established: Through the habit of taking notes, you will inevitably come to observe more; observing more, you will have more to note down.”

  • “How should you read? What should the diet of your reading be? Read the best writers from all different periods; keep your reading of contemporaries in proportion—you do not want a steady diet of contemporary literature. You already belong to your time.”

• A fun, quick read about some Big Houses in Ireland 

• My favorite readers might just be backlist editors and this article, by McNally Editor Lucy Sholes, highlights the process of republishing a forgotten book. It also includes this line from the author Kay Dick’s obituary: “a talented woman bedevilled by ingratitude and a kind of manic desire to avenge totally imaginary wrongs,” who “expended far more energy in pursuing personal vendettas and romantic lesbian friendships than in writing books”.

• All I want to do is read a print magazine and this Brenda’s Business interview with Sophia Neophitou the Editor-in-Chief and Publisher of 10 Magazine delves into the realities of magazine publishing.

• Merve Emre, Adam Bradley, and William Maxwell got together for the Library of America to chat about John A. Williams’s explosive 1967 novel, The Man Who Cried I Am, a lost classic. The panel discussion also covers black writers in Paris, the FBI, and the 1960s.

• The Cut article on RHONY super star Bethenny Frankel presents a haunting portrait of the reality star turned TikTok influencer. Frankel “regrets not buying stock in the app, though she does not mention the fact that she tried to sue it last year.” But, there’s something very Grey Gardens about it all:

  • “I’m so happy that someone is finally here. I’m always alone. I’m sitting here by myself. I’m in my own nutty world… I’m so happy. I feel seen. I feel seen right now.”

• Gstaad Guy interview with Business of Fashion:

  • “Slowly, through storytelling, I built a really strong connection with my audience around a very few, very high-end products, which are historically very difficult to market, and it gave the brands no choice but to work with me. I became their ambassador before they asked me to.”

    • The rep of very!

• Re-sharing the Tom Ford interview for GQ because I (finally) read it - lol! Ford describes himself as a “commercial fashion designer” with an artistic taste. The article helps contextualize the current fashion climate as Ford shares the creation of Kering and what went into that. Looking forward to more Tom Ford films in the future.

• Emilia Petrarca (great Substack) interviewed Julia Fox for SSENSE. Such a fun read.

• In Their Own Words is a three-part BBC documentary from 2010 about British Novelists. It spans 1919 to 1990. Includes interview clips of Jean Rhys, Evelyn Waugh, Jane Howard, and more. A really informative watch (3 hours!) and I’m so happy a kind soul put it in Youtube for me.

• I only just discovered that the woman in the Lucien Freud’s painting I love was his wife Lady Caroline Blackwood and she was an author! Her debut, The Stepdaughter, will be re-published by McNally. In anticipation of this release, I listened to a Youtube lecture called 'Reading Caroline Blackwood.’

  • Blackwood is known for her, “Dark comedy, exaggerated characters and extreme situations.”

*Not monetized. 2024 goal?
**Now I am (almost) half way through the book.
***You can watch the film for free on Youtube here.
****In the memoir we learn that she was fastidious about maintaining her pre-baby weight during the entirety of the pregnancy.
*****I loved Anne Hathway’s make up in the film.
******In one of Eileen’s final letters to George, she writes to ask permission for a hysterectomy and says, “What worries me is that I really don’t think I am worth the money” (311). He did not receive the letter in time. She died at the age of 39.