Emily Rhodes

By the book: The NSA is behaving like a villain in a 1950s novel

Internet users might find something familiar in Dorothy Whipple’s Someone at a Distance

[Getty Images/iStockphoto]

The continuing drip-feed of stories about governments and friendly-seeming internet giants sifting through our data has left some citizens feeling outraged and a bit duped. I have no doubt that they would sympathise with poor deceived Ellen North in Dorothy Whipple’s brilliant 1950s novel Someone at a Distance.

‘Ellen was that unfashionable creature, a happy housewife’, who works herself to the bone to make a cheerful home for her children and indolent, self-satisfied husband, Avery.

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