Thought for the Week: Joseph Jones on women’s work

‘There is a clear lesson here for those of us who share lives with women.’

by Joseph Jones 17th December 2021

We lost too many people in that long first year of pandemic. Among them was the poet Eavan Boland, who had returned to her native Ireland to be close to family during the crisis. She already had some experience of lockdown – artistically, that is, having written ‘Quarantine’ (2008) about a couple leaving a workhouse amid the 1847 typhus epidemic. It was, she says, ‘the worst hour of the worst season of the worst year of a whole people’. It’s a tragic love poem. Exhausted and ‘sick with famine fever’, the wife is carried by the husband into the cold. They’re found dead the following morning, with her feet against his chest for warmth.