Helen Lewis: Great Wives, Radio 4
Sunday Miscellany, RTÉ Radio 1
Even Google let me down.
I hit a search for “Great Wives” and was urged to think again: did I want “Great Lives”?
There’s the rub. Take Mileva Maric, ever heard of her? She was the wife of Albert Einstein.
They were intellectual as well as romantic partners.
When Albert told his mother that he wanted to marry her, she said: “Like you, she is a book. But you ought to have a wife.”
Maric was his sounding board and is thought to have helped him with calculations.
“I’ll be so happy and proud when we are together and can bring our work on relative motion to a successful conclusion,” he wrote.
But it turned sour alas. At one point, he made her sign a contract detailing her wifely duties which included cooking, doing his laundry and only speaking to him when necessary.
And yes, we all know about Albert, but what about the likely genius of Mileva Maric?
And what about Margaret Keane. Her husband Walter was famous for his Big Eyes paintings in the 1960s.
Five years into their marriage, Margaret said she was the one who painted those pictures.
It went to court where the judge challenged them both to paint. Margaret completed hers in 53 minutes but Walter said he couldn’t paint because of a shoulder injury.
Great Wives, presented by Helen Lewis, is a light-hearted but thought-provoking look at the lives of the women who supported the geniuses of history.
See episode “Thanks for Typing”.
The series is both an education and fun.
Looking out of the window at the summer we are not having, RTÉ’s Sunday Miscellany whisked us away to foreign climes.
Small Girl, Red Flowers by Sarah Moore Fitzgerald painted the perfect picture of summer in Viareggio, Italy.
Think sunshine, music, red and white striped umbrellas and beach sellers with sweet pastries crying “bomboloni”.
And then the small girl, the couple’s daughter, disappears.
When you have little of the language and are distraught, you end up saying “small girl, red flowers” in Italian because that is all you have. Sarah did not have the words for flowery swimsuit.
It was just 15 minutes but it felt to her parents like an eternity.
So that when a woman arrived carrying the child crying in her arms, she was a Botticelli angel.
A happy ending and a story beautifully told.
