Review
Wifedom by Anna Funder review – a brilliant reckoning
with George Orwell to change the way you read
Blending forensic research, fiction, life writing and
criticism, Funder upends the legacy of literary triumph to reveal the woman
behind it
Susan
Wyndham
Thu 6 Jul
2023 16.00 BST
Wifedom may
seem an old-fashioned word these days. But be assured that Anna Funder – the
Australian author of Stasiland, human rights lawyer, decoder of doublethink –
gives it a slashing edge. Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life is a brilliant,
creative hybrid of life writing, feminist polemic and literary criticism, which
upends the way we read.
In 2017,
“at a moment of peak overload” in her family and stalled in her stellar writing
career, Funder bought a first edition of George Orwell’s Collected Essays,
Journalism and Letters. An admirer of this exposer of tyranny – most famously
in his novels Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four – she was provoked by his
essay on the writer’s life to follow his trail back to her own, buried as it
was under the “motherload of wifedom”.
What she
discovered in her forensic reading was Eileen Blair, 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 quarantine 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 and all fictions
of omission, which minimise the roles of women, use the passive voice to
disguise Eileen’s agency, and blur Orwell’s infidelity and neglect. She goes
back to the primary source material, crucially the “revelation” of six letters
from Eileen to her friend Norah Myles, which came to light in 2005 – after the
biographies were published – and give her a frank, humorous voice. 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”.
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 uterine
tumours, until her death aged 39. The facts of her life were detailed by Sylvia
Topp in a 2020 crowdfunded biography, Eileen: The Making of George Orwell,
which must have given pause to Funder (who acknowledges her material), but
lacks the synthesis and panache of Wifedom.
Funder’s
narrative is a stylistic mosaic, which draws on skills developed in her
previous books: the nonfiction bestseller, Stasiland, about East Germany’s
surveillance of its citizens, and her Miles Franklin award winner, All That I
Am, a novel about German pacifists fleeing nazism. Clearly Orwell’s work has
been a beacon for hers.
Her tour de
force here is a dramatic counter-account of his time volunteering for
anti-fascist forces in the Spanish civil war, which he wrote about in Homage to
Catalonia. Funder tells us that Eileen, having edited The Road to Wigan Pier
and grown bored with walking the goat, took herself to Barcelona to work at the
political headquarters of the Independent Labour party, where she was granted
an insider’s view of the failed revolution and its propaganda. Although Orwell
mentions “my wife” 37 times, he omits her name and actions: she visited him at
the front, cared for him when wounded, saved his manuscript and their
passports, protected him from arrest – while being watched by communist spies.
All
biography is partial, but Funder makes an undeniable case for believing in
Eileen. Careful not to overstate her input to Orwell’s writing, she 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 written after her death.
To fill
gaps, Funder imagines nuanced novelistic scenes. In one standout, Eileen lies
bleeding in bed while discussing Orwell’s essay about Salvador Dalí’s
“repellent” art; the hypocrisy of her husband’s own seedy sexual behaviour
hovers unstated. Funder enlivens her scholarship with interviews and travel,
becoming least sure, even apologetic, about her frustrations as a working
mother. She is, after all, a privileged, successful woman whose husband jokes
that her book would not have been written without him. Yet, still carrying the
load in her household, she writes for generations of women and her own
daughter.
Wifedom is
a dashing addition to a genre of books that bring out of obscurity the women
(and occasional man) behind famous writers and artists. Funder’s scrutiny of
previous biographies recalls Janet Malcolm’s 30-year-old classic, The Silent
Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, warmed by her own humane vision. She does
not abandon her hero but holds him – and society – to account for his blind
ambition.
Wifedom by
Anna Funder (Penguin Books Ltd, £20). To support the Guardian and Observer,
order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
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