Elizabeth Flock is a journalist who covers gender and justice, and is the author of “The Heart is a Shifting Sea: Love and Marriage in Mumbai.”
The English novelist George Eliot, who used a pen name because of the prevailing sexism of the 19th century — her real name was Mary Ann Evans — once wrote that “there is no private life which is not determined by a wider public life.” She believed that people act according to the conditions of their time, that, in fact, we are endlessly impressionable, influenced by everything around us. This feels true, but it is hard to know for sure: Our private lives so often remain unseen, unstudied and unwritten.
