Writer Drusilla Modjeska has built a career exploring the extraordinary lives of pioneering women writers and artists, who have never stopped asking important questions about gender, freedom and expression.

Drusilla was born in England right at the end of the Second World War.

She was raised to be a well-behaved and self-effacing young woman, in a very conservative time in history.

But Drusilla escaped this version of herself by marrying very young and moving to Papua New Guinea, and then to Australia.

On the other side of the world, her eyes were opened to different ways of being, and Drusilla went on to build a big career exploring the lives of pioneering women writers and visual artists.

In writing about the lives of women artists, Drusilla was eventually led to writing about her own mother, Poppy, whose creativity and independence were stymied by marriage and who was committed to a psychiatric institution when Drusilla was 12 years old.

This episode of Conversations was produced by Meggie Morris. Executive Producer is Nicola Harrison.

It explores surrealism, surrealist art, art of the Pacific, Claude Cahun, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Clara Westhoff, Rainer Maria Rilke, Marcel Moore, Gabriele Münter, Kandinsky, Lee Miller, Dora Maa, Picasso, painting, World War 2, boomers, conservatism, trad wives, feminism, manosphere, Louis Theroux, toxic masculinity, equal rights, misogyny, psychiatric treatment for women, institutionalised, women of world war 2, The First Aid Nursing Yeomanry, the fany.

To binge even more great episodes of the ‘Conversations podcast’ with Richard Fidler and Sarah Kanowski go the ABC listen app (Australia) or wherever you get your podcasts. There you’ll find hundreds of the best thought-provoking interviews with authors, writers, artists, politicians, singers, psychologists, musicians, and celebrities.