Latest news with #JessicaStanley
The Guardian
3 days ago
- General
- The Guardian
Working from home? It's so much nicer if you're a man
I'm wary of gendered generalisations. They rightly raise hackles: we are unique, not defined by gender, not all men! But I was struck by one I read from Ella Risbridger in her review of Jessica Stanley's recent novel, Consider Yourself Kissed. Exploring one of its themes, Risbridger wrote: 'I have long noticed that in a house with one spare room and a heterosexual couple who both work from home, the spare room is where he works – with a door that shuts and perhaps even a designated desk – and she works somewhere else. (Always for good reasons, but always.)' This stopped me in my tracks. Not because it's my experience: my husband and I are lucky enough to have an office each, and mine is bigger and objectively nicer. I get the garden view; he has the ballet of Openreach and Amazon vans. (See – not all men.) It's not Stanley's experience either: she uses the spare bedroom; her husband has half the living room, she told the Cut's Book Gossip newsletter. Rather, I was struck because having just read the Australian writer Helen Garner's recently published diaries, How to End a Story, this is exactly the irreconcilable, constantly rehashed point of contention between her and her ex-husband, anonymised in the diaries as 'V'. V, also a writer, insists not only on appropriating the available room in their shared apartment for his office, but on Garner leaving while he works, her presence incompatible with his sacred need for silent isolation. Garner describes the quotidian pain of this situation (she wants to potter, play music, cook, see friends; her creativity is fuelled by these ordinary kinds of life), and the growing realisation of what it said about their relationship with shocking, powerful eloquence. V is aware of, but apparently unmoved by, her distress. They argue about it regularly. Garner's experience was so egregious as to be eye-poppingly enraging, but this happens more often in quieter, easier-to-overlook ways. I read and enjoyed Consider Yourself Kissed too – it's a romance, but it also subtly builds a picture of the insidious sidelining of women's work as expressed through domestic space. Set between 2013 and 2023, it's particularly good on how this was amplified by Covid: the heroine's political journalist husband sees his career go stratospheric and their spare room 'somehow' becomes his study. He's a nice man; he loves her; it just … happens. This rang true because it is: it did just happen. Structural pay equalities meant men – habitually the higher earners – staked the more obvious primary claim on working space in locked-down homes. Research shows women experienced more non-work interruptions, compounded when they didn't have a 'dedicated unshared workspace' – their emotional wellbeing suffered, but so did their professional lives. 'My husband locks the room from the inside when he needs to concentrate,' a participant in an Indian study on pandemic working habits reported. 'I don't have that liberty. I have no room of my own.' In 1929, Virginia Woolf wrote A Room of One's Own as a riposte to the physical and economic exclusion of women from intellectual and professional spaces. In 2025, they can't bar us from libraries, but intimate domestic spaces have proved stubbornly intractable. Back when men had inviolable studies and smoking rooms, there was an assumption that the domestic sphere was feminine, so they 'needed' to escape the noise and mess of childrearing and homemaking. Now we're ostensibly all in it together, doing conference calls in our slippers, but there are still more man caves than women's. Because Risbridger is right: the recently released UK 2024 Skills and Employment survey found 60% of men had a dedicated room for work at home and only 40% of women. We still can't manage to meet Woolf's prescription. There are not-all-men exceptions and happy endings. Garner escaped, thank God, eventually; and, without spoilers, Stanley's heroine reclaims some space. But in real life, generally, women's work is still given less and worse space, while the gender pay gap narrows agonisingly slowly. The two are surely related. When do we get that room of our own? Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist
Wall Street Journal
21-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Wall Street Journal
‘Consider Yourself Kissed' Review: Jumping Right In
Coralie Bower and Adam Whiteman meet kind-of cute a few pages into Jessica Stanley's winning second novel, 'Consider Yourself Kissed': Coralie jumps into a pond to save Adam's precocious 4-year-old daughter from drowning. That's a pretty clear signal they're meant for each other. If more signals are required here they are: Adam, a journalist, is clever and witty, and Coralie, an advertising copywriter, ably matches him quip for quip. Adam, a divorcé, says that he looks like Colin Firth, albeit shorter and younger. Meanwhile, Coralie, who is a few years removed from a bad break-up, allows that she looks like Elizabeth Bennet, or so her classmates had often told her. Readers who don't quickly key into the 'Pride and Prejudice' reference—Daphne du Maurier's 'Rebecca' is invoked here as well—may want to consider different reading matter. Coralie is an easy mark for Adam's warmth and charm. She recently moved to London from her native Australia to get away from an assortment of bad situations and bad memories, is getting nowhere on her long-aborning writing project, and is thus feeling unmoored. For the record, their courtship is a delight to behold. But when, very quickly, they move in together, things get messy. Then again, life is messy. 'Consider Yourself Kissed' (the title is a reference to the sign-off of a character in Mary McCarthy's 'The Group') details the 10-year period between 2012 and 2022. It's a turbulent decade for Britain—many arrivals and swift departures at 10 Downing Street; Brexit; the pandemic.
