Author Lucy Ellmann on her first essay collection Things Are Against Us, and envisioning a world led by women

In an interview with Firstpost, Ellmann talks about Virginia Woolf being among her biggest inspirations, why Trump is “one of the biggest failures of all time”, and more In her first collection of essays, Things Are Against Us, US-born British novelist Lucy Ellmann, shows how anger and humour remain the two primary weapons in her arsenal. Ben Jonson is one of the few writers that can pull it off: ‘In small proportions we just beauties see; / And in short measures life may perfect be.’ These essays, frequently footnoted, are about various things — environmental concerns, your disenchantment with Agatha Christie and Donald Trump, your rage against America reaching a new level of patriarchal absurdity, and your disapproval of men’s eroticisation of bras — do you see these essays cohere at some point and crystallise into a feminist manifesto? Things that might not be altered by matriarchy are the existence of Agatha Christie books, and the way inanimate objects are out to get us — even matriarchy can’t save us from spitting lemons, rebellious pillowcases, and slippery piles of envelopes. In “Three Strikes”, you draw on Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas and state that women should go on strike in three areas — housework, labour and sex — if they wish to topple male supremacy and bring our planet back from the brink of annihilation. Right now, I have three things on the go, all by men : Laurent Binet’s The 7thFunction of Language, which takes post-structuralist theory down a peg or two ; Peter Verhelst’s The Man I Became, a poignant fantasy about an imprisoned ape-cum-slave, trained to talk; and Charles Dickens’ Little Dorrit, which is just a blast, and refreshingly humane — life is hard in Victorian London, but not as irredeemably directionless, discourteous, and banal as it seems today.