‘It can’t have been fun for the Buddha’s wife, Left on her own for the rest of her life.” Ruth Silcock’s poem bemoans the fate of the wives of Great Men, sidelined or neglected while their busy husbands are exalted. By the 1990s, the idea that the role of wife represented an aspect of patriarchal oppression was uncontroversial.
In 2017, the writer Anna Funder, best known for Stasiland, found herself cognisant for the first time that