WIFEDOM: Mrs Orwell's Invisible Life

By Anna Funder 

Anna Funder

“Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life” ,

is a mixture of life writing, feminist polemic and literary criticism. 

Part biography, part memoir, part feminist treatise and part counter fiction.

Anna Funder is a former Human Rights Lawyer, especially interested in the unjust system of Power Relations that underlies them all: Patriarchy!

Systems of oppression from the point of view of people who have the insight and the courage to resist them, often women.

In 2017, “at a moment of overload” in her family and a “halt” in her work as a writer, Funder bought a first edition of George Orwell’s Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters. 

She was an admirer of Orwell’s exposer of tyranny - most famously in his novels: “Animal Farm” and “1984” - . She wanted to understand the writer’s life to follow his trail back to her own, buried as it was under the “motherload of wifedom”.

George Orwell has always been one of Funder’s literary heroes, and she describes how she came to writing this book by rediscovering the joy of his work and questioning the conditions of his production. As the story of Eileen and her marriage to Orwell emerges, Funder finds herself questioning the man behind the art she loves.

What she discovered in her reading was Eileen Blair - George Orwell’s first wife -, the talented, daring, stoical woman hidden behind the writing and life of Orwell (the pen name of Eric Blair).

In her book, she argues – with Eileen as key witness – that Patriarchy allows men to keep apart their professional and private lives, “delegate and lie to the women who support them, and leave them out of the story”.

Funder reads the six major biographies of Orwell, all written by men. They all minimise the roles of women, use the passive voice to disguise Eileen’s independent power and blur Orwell’s infidelity and neglect.

She goes back to the primary source material, crucially the “revelation” of 6 letters - covering the period of Eileen marriage to George Orwell, from 1936 to 1945 -, from Eileen to her friend Norah Myles, which came to light in 2005 - after Orwell’s biographies were published 

Eileen O’Shaughnessy (1905-45) went to Oxford on a scholarship but dropped out of a master of arts in psychology at University College London, to move to a cold, unplumbed country cottage so her new husband could write. She ran their farm and shop, typed and edited his work, held paying jobs, cared for their adopted son, and nursed him when he was sick with tuberculosis and she with uterus tumours, until her death aged 39.

The first, written six months after their marriage in 1936, reports that Orwell was annoyed the wedding interrupted his work, and that she had planned to “write one letter to everyone when the murder or separation had been accomplished”!!!

Early married life for the Orwells in their cottage in Wallington was a period marked by much hardship – and yet among the most productive and creatively-rewarding years for Orwell.

When Orwell was volunteering for anti-fascist forces in the Spanish civil war, which he wrote about in “Homage to Catalonia”, Funder tells us that Eileen, grown bored with walking the goat, “took herself to Barcelona to work at the political headquarters of the Independent Labour party”, where she gave an insider’s view of the failed revolution and its propaganda. Although she visited him at the front, cared for him when wounded, saved his manuscript and their passes, Orwell mentions “my wife” 37 times, omits her name and actions that protected him from arrest – while being watched by communist spies. Yet despite her apparent absence in her husband’s text, Funder reveals that Eileen was there too – at the heart of the operation.

As was the case for so many women, the Second World War opened employment opportunities for Eileen. Eileen worked at the Ministry of Censorship, in Senate House, the place Orwell took as his model for the Ministry of Truth in “1984”. How might her work there have informed Orwell’s understanding of government censorship?

Careful not to overstate her input to Orwell’s writing, Funder sees an obvious reason for his creative growth after marriage. Certainly Eileen suggested making Animal Farm a fable; most likely her poem “End of the Century 1984”, and her second world war work in the Ministry of Information, fed the dystopian masterpiece “1984”, written after her death.

Orwell is mysogyne But:!! Relied on women at every turn.

According to his editor Reese: On the surface pleasant, humorous, witty, considerate, gentle, but unpredictable. Below surface: Awkward!

More sadly, the Eileen O’Shaughnessy supposedly brought into daylight by Funder is a timid, sad and literal-minded creature.

As Jenny Joseph wrote in New Humanist almost two decades ago: “Quite a lot was known and recorded about Eileen from this time, and all who knew her remembered a delightful, witty companion, a loyal and intelligent friend, and a marvellous letter writer.”

It’s widely recorded that Eileen opted to have the operation that led to her death at a hospital in Newcastle rather than in London as the former would be faster and cheaper. Funder treats her death after the operation as practically inevitable, and lays the blame squarely with Orwell. 

Our reading group very much appreciated this book and do recommend reading it, but would have liked to know more about Eileen and her reasons for undergoing and accepting the abuses of her husband.

We discovered more about Orwell than we did about Eileen. So much so that some of us reread “Animal Farm” and 1984”.

“Wifedom” is yet another addition to books that bring out of obscurity the women (and occasional man) behind famous writers and artists.

Loeky Borloo.