Wifedom : Mrs. Orwell's invisible life

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Title:

Wifedom : Mrs. Orwell's invisible life / Anna Funder.

Author/Creator:

Funder, Anna, 1966- author.

Publication:

London : Hamish Hamilton, 2023.

Physical description:

451 pages : illustrations, portraits ; 24 cm.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references.

Contents:

Wifedom, a counterfiction -- Invisible warrior -- Invisible worker -- Happy ending -- Afterlife.

Summary:

A riveting work about the woman who sacrificed her future for one of the most famous writers of the twentieth century and a probing look at what it means to be a wife and a writer in the modern world. Looking for wonder and some reprieve from the everyday, award-winning writer Anna Funder slips into the pages of her hero George Orwell. As she watches him create his writing self, she tries to remember her own. When she uncovers his forgotten wife, it's a revelation. Eileen O'Shaughnessy's literary brilliance shaped Orwell's work and her practical common sense saved his life. But why-and how-was she written out of the story? Using newly discovered letters from Eileen to her best friend, Funder recreates the Orwells' marriage, through the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War in London. As she rolls up the screen concealing Orwell's private life she is led to question what it takes to be a writer-and what it is to be a wife. Genre-bending and utterly original, Wifedom is an ode to the unsung work of women everywhere today, while offering a breathtakingly intimate view of one of the most important literary marriages of the twentieth century. It is a book that speaks to our present moment as much as it illuminates the past.

ISBN:

9780143787112 (paperback)

014378711X (paperback)

Subjects:

Authors' spouses -- England -- Biography.

Wives -- England -- Biography.

Authors' spouses -- Great Britain -- Biography.

Biographies.

Blair, Eileen, 1905-1945.

Orwell, George, 1903-1950 -- Marriage.

Record ID:

SD_ILS:1415816

Available:

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Bound With These Titles

On Order

Summary

* A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2023 *
* THE FINANCIAL TIMES BEST BOOKS OF 2023 - LITERARY NON-FICTION *
'Simply, a masterpiece. Here, Anna Funder not only re-makes the art of biography, she resurrects a woman in full. And this in a narrative that grips the reader and unfolds through some of the most consequential moments - historical and cultural - of the twentieth century.' GERALDINE BROOKS

'There's exhilaration in reading every brilliant word.' CHLOE HOOPER

Looking for wonder and some reprieve from the everyday, Anna Funder slips into the pages of her hero George Orwell. As she watches him create his writing self, she tries to remember her own...

When she uncovers his forgotten wife, it's a revelation. Eileen O'Shaughnessy's literary brilliance shaped Orwell's work and her practical nous saved his life. But why - and how - was she written out of the story?

Using newly discovered letters from Eileen to her best friend, Funder recreates the Orwells' marriage, through the Spanish Civil War and WW II in London. As she rolls up the screen concealing Orwell's private life she is led to question what it takes to be a writer - and what it is to be a wife.

Compelling and utterly original, Wifedom speaks to the unsung work of women everywhere today, while offering a breathtakingly intimate view of one of the most important literary marriages of the 20th century. It is a book that speaks to our present moment as much as it illuminates the past.

'So, she will live writing the letters she did - six to her best friend, and three to her husband. I know where she was when she wrote them. I know that the dishes were frozen in the sink, that she was bleeding, that he was in bed with another woman - and she knew it. . . .I supply only what a film director would, directing an actor on set - the wiping of spectacles, the ash on the carpet, a cat pouring itself off her lap.'

Reviews (5)

Bookseller Publisher Review

When researching a new book on George Orwell, powerhouse writer Anna Funder noticed an interesting omission--Eileen Orwell, George's first wife, was curiously absent. The basis of Wifedom is six newly discovered letters from Eileen to her best friend, Norah. It incorporates other letters and facts from the Orwells' lives and Funder's exquisite imagining of Eileen's days. By reading between the lines, piecing together letters, clues and mentions in other people's diaries, and analysing George's books and biographies, Funder conjures Eileen as intelligent, funny, dry and self-effacing. Through this process, she provides insight into Orwell that other biographers staunchly avoid mentioning: his womanising, his weakness, his cruelty, and his selfishness. Wifedom also includes the author's reflections and questions about creative expression and the nature of art. What do you do when your favourite author was a misogynist? What does that mean for you as a reader, writer and wife? What are the conditions required to create art? Are you the wife or the writer? Can you ever be both? In its innovation and coherence, it is reminiscent of Erik Larson's In the Garden of Beasts or Julian Barnes's The Noise of Time . This intriguing work is a mix of styles and genres, blending academic research, literary reading and philosophical reflection into a riveting biography that not only rediscovers Eileen and paints a picture of a volatile period of history but also poses questions about what we value in art.

Publisher's Weekly Review

Eileen O'Shaughnessy, George Orwell's first wife, takes center stage in this potent biography. Funder (Stasiland), a former human rights lawyer, suggests that O'Shaughnessy, who married Orwell in 1936 and stayed with him until her death nine years later from a botched hysterectomy, was crucial to Orwell's success; she typed and edited his manuscripts, managed his correspondence, cooked his meals, nursed him through ill health, tolerated his sexual affairs, and even cleaned the outhouse at their country home. According to Funder, she also directly influenced some of her husband's most famous work, encouraging him to express his criticism of Stalinism as a satirical novel (Animal Farm) instead of the essay he had planned, and possibly inspiring 1984 with her poem "End of the Century, 1984," about "a dystopian future of telepathy and mind control." Funder pulls no punches when discussing Orwell's cruelty, taking him to task for allegedly demanding that O'Shaughnessy let him sleep with one of the "young Arab girls" he had been eyeing while the pair were traveling in Morocco. Stylistic flourishes enhance the account, most notably the novelistic interludes interspersing Funder's narration with first-person passages drawn from O'Shaughnessy's letters that recreate scenes from her life, such as lying ill in London while the city was bombed during WWII. Full of keen psychological insight and eloquent prose, this shines. Photos. (Aug.)

Guardian Review

There's a line of poetry that's been bobbing about at the back of my head for at least 30 years: "It can't have been fun for the Buddha's wife, Left on her own for the rest of her life." Ruth Silcock's poem bemoans the fate of the wives of Great Men, sidelined or neglected while their busy husbands are exalted. By the 1990s, the idea that the role of wife represented an aspect of patriarchal oppression was pervasive and uncontroversial. Hardly surprising: it had been a cornerstone of feminist thought ever since Charlotte Perkins Gilman lifted the lid on wifedom and servitude with Women and Economics in 1898 or, for that matter, Mary Wollstonecraft insisted women were more than male property in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman back in 1792. I've been wondering lately if feminism is subject to a Groundhog Day-style curse in which all previous knowledge is periodically obliterated. In 2017, the writer Anna Funder, best known for Stasiland, found herself bitterly metabolising the revelations of #MeToo, cognisant for the first time that she as a wife had taken up the lion's share of parenting and housework. She turned to George Orwell for insight into her oppression, only to discover lurking in the shadows the emblematic figure of his wife, Eileen, whose story she seizes on as a way of exorcising her feelings. Eileen O'Shaughnessy was a clever, Oxford-educated, independent-minded girl from a comfortable background. She encountered Orwell at a party in 1935 and was so charmed by this tall, ungainly, moth-eaten man that when he proposed at their next meeting she said yes. They set up shop, literally, in a primitive cottage in rural Hertfordshire, where it rapidly became apparent that Eileen was expected to serve as editor, cook, shopkeeper, hen wrangler, cesspit swiller and devoted nurse (Orwell was plagued by chest infections, as yet undiagnosed as the tuberculosis that would kill him). The degree to which she relished her new life can be judged by a witty letter, one of a clutch of six that surfaced in 2005, to her best friend Norah Symes: "I lost the habit of punctual correspondence during the first few weeks of marriage because we quarrelled so continuously & really bitterly that I thought I'd save time and write one letter to everyone when the murder or separation had been accomplished." Humour of a very dry sort is Eileen's armour, her mode of passage through increasingly threadbare and alarming times. Within a year, Orwell had volunteered in the Spanish civil war. Eileen followed him, determined not to be stuck at home in charge of the potato crop. Orwell served with POUM, a left-Communist party soon blacklisted by Stalin and subjected to a terrifying purge. In Funder's account, Eileen emerges from the margins to which Orwell consigned her in Homage to Catalonia. It seems she may have been more politically engaged than him, effectively running the POUM offices and taking enormous personal risks when the purge began. Eileen continued to write her sly, astringent letters through the second world war, finding occasions for amused self-mockery even as bombs began to fall. She worked at the Ministry of Information, a job she loathed, in order to keep her ill, broke husband afloat. Friends recognised her witty fingerprints all over Animal Farm, originally planned by Orwell as a plain-speaking account of the iniquities of Stalinism. Her beloved brother was killed in France and she was often unwell, perilously underweight and suffering massive bleeds that may have been caused by endometriosis. Despite this, in the summer of 1944 she agreed to Orwell's newfound desire to adopt a child, taking up the heavy lifting of parenthood alone when he decided to go to Europe as a reporter, a departure so abrupt he missed the adoption hearing. Her last letters to Orwell make painful reading. She needed an operation and wrote to ask his permission. She was worried about the cost, despite all the medical care he'd required, writing the appalling line: "What worries me is that I really don't think I am worth the money." The letter didn't reach him in time. Without a reply, she chose the cheapest procedure on offer. She died on the operating table, though not before writing a last-ditch letter that gutters out as the anaesthetic takes hold and evinces pure terror beneath the practised layers of stoicism and determined, dogged wit. Eileen was ill-served by Orwell's own biographers, much like the four Mrs Hemingways and the two Mrs Hardys, and doubtless every other woman who has the misfortune of becoming a Great Man's wife. It's clear her husband expected inordinate quantities of unpaid labour and declined to pay attention to her physical health. I agree with Funder that Eileen's treatment in life and afterlife isn't accidental - that the minimising indifference is part and parcel of the ongoing patriarchal reduction of women to something less than fully human, at best helpmeet and at worst repellent slut or scold. What I object to is her process of correction. Funder believes Eileen is a woman in a box, a woman who needs rescuing from the bad actors of patriarchy, the malevolent magicians who have effected her disappearance. Her self-appointed task is to piece Eileen back together. Not by assembling a biography, as Sylvia Topp did with Eileen: The Making of George Orwell in 2020, but instead by writing a counterfiction to plug all those enigmatic gaps. Eileen herself used wit as a shield. Funder strips it away, converting the letters into staged scenes in which Eileen confesses to feelings she chose to disavow and suffers a conventional repertoire of emotions she declined to record. It's not known for certain whether Eileen had an affair with Orwell's commander in Spain; Funder imagines the relationship as coercive. It's not known whether Eileen minded Orwell's affairs; Funder insists she was humiliated and destroyed by them. Is it useful to remove a woman's agency? To deny her capacity to make her own choices, including potentially perverse or damaging ones? Will this help dismantle what Funder describes as "the planetary Ponzi scheme" of patriarchy? For me, the most disturbing moments in Wifedom weren't how Eileen was treated by Orwell but the sustained attempt to present her as a sobbing victim, to display her broken when she sought so fiercely to present herself as strong. This isn't to say that I approve of Orwell's own behaviour. He was what might once have been called, euphemistically, a pouncer, manipulating women into sex. At least one girlfriend accused him of trying to physically force her, which these days we call attempted rape. I can see why you'd want to lean back into those rooms and hear what the women were thinking. But you can't replace the mores of wartime bohemian London with contemporary attitudes simply by shunting your cast into the present tense. Most of all, you can't strip away someone's defences and call it empowerment. It isn't. "Wifedom," Funder writes, "is a wicked magic trick. I want to expose how it is done and so take its wicked tricking power away." How many more centuries, I wonder, will we need to expose how we were robbed before we lose faith in exposure as a weapon and conjure patriarchy's replacement instead?

Kirkus Review

An electrifying biography of George Orwell's first wife. In 2017, Funder, author of Stasiland and All That I Am, found herself embarking on a massive Orwell reading project in an effort to excavate herself from the domestic drudgery that seemed to be dominating her life. Coming across a strange passage in Orwell's private notebook that cites the "incorrigible dirtiness & untidiness" and "terrible, devouring sexuality" of married women, Funder sought more information about Orwell's first wife, Eileen O'Shaughnessy (1905-1945), an Oxford graduate and working woman. As the author notes, she is a somewhat inscrutable figure in the major male-authored biographies of Orwell. This book is not a traditional biography but rather a pastiche of Eileen's letters to her friend Norah Symes, Funder's invented scenes of the Orwells' lives, and a first-person account of Funder's own life as the mother of teenage daughters as the "revelations of #MeToo erupt," a time of "unspeakable truths." Eileen is a worthy subject in her own right, but the author ably depicts the balance of power between the Orwells, particularly the way George wrote Eileen out of the narrative. With a combination of excitement and indignation, Funder recounts how, during Orwell's stint in the Spanish Civil War, Eileen, who had followed her husband to Spain, was doing complicated and dangerous work in the office of the Independent Labour Party, producing its English-language newspaper and radio program. Funder creates a convincing, vivid portrait of Eileen as an irreplaceable font of unpaid labor for George. Not only did she take care of domestic affairs; she also edited and typed for him, prioritized his work above all else, and suffered through his many extramarital affairs (on the latter note, the author rejects the oft-repeated notion that the Orwells had an open marriage). Daring in both form and content, Funder's book is a nuanced, sophisticated literary achievement. A sharp, captivating look at a complicated relationship and a resurrection of a vital figure in Orwell's life. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Booklist Review

Australian writer Funder's creative life was being crushed beneath the "motherload of wifedom." For an antidote, she turned to one of her favorite writers, George Orwell, rereading his inspiring work and "six major biographies" only to find herself wondering about the glaring absence of his first wife, Eileen O'Shaughnessy. By dint of extensive research and literary daring, Funder retrieves Eileen from the shadows in a provocative mix of facts and "a fiction that tries not to lie," using her remarkable subject's vivid letters as prompts for imagined scenes that fill the maddening gaps in Orwell's autobiographical accounts and those of his biographers. Eileen emerges as a brilliant, funny, resourceful, stoic, hard-working Oxford graduate whose dystopian poem, "1984," published in 1934, is but one of many of her crucial influences on George's work. She also saved lives in Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War, kept body and soul together for her often ailing and cruelly unfaithful husband, and worked during WWII at the Ministry of Information and the BBC as bombs exploded and her precarious health eroded, leading to her death at 39. Laced with personal reflections and charged with a searing critique of the patriarchy and its smothering of women's lives and legacies, Funder's gripping and insightful portrait of the hidden Eileen Orwell is incandescent.

Books

Lending

Funder, Anna, 1966- author.

9780143787112 (paperback)

014378711X (paperback)

9780143787112

SD_ILS:1415816

Funder, Anna, 1966-

Wifedom : Mrs. Orwell's invisible life

Authors' spouses -- England -- Biography.

Wives -- England -- Biography.

Authors' spouses -- Great Britain -- Biography.

Biographies.

Blair, Eileen, 1905-1945.

Orwell, George, 1903-1950 -- Marriage.

Wifedom : Mrs. Orwell's invisible life

Funder, Anna, 1966-

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