By whom? Anna Funder.

Subtitle? Mrs Orwell's Invisible Life.

When? 2023.

Why? A friend gave it to me...

Genre? Biography. Kind of...

The year 2005 saw the discovery of six letters from Eileen O'Shaughnessy (1905-45) to her friend Norah Symes Myles. They cover the almost nine-year period of Eileen's marriage to George Orwell (1903-50).

Funder incorporates the letters into three types of narrative:

1. The past, told in the 3rd person, but very much through the eyes of Eileen, and including verbatim excerpts from the letters.

2. The past, but this time through authorial eyes, and therefore with a wider lens.

3. The present. This thread is the author's account of why she's writing this book in this way. There are plenty of biographies of Orwell, she tells us, but they hardly give any space to Eileen. So she wants to bring Eileen out of the box she has been consigned to all these years: "I wanted to make her live, and at the same time to reveal the wicked magic trick that had erased her, and that still holds sway today." For Funder, Eileen has been buried twice, first by domesticity, then by history. Quoting Gerda Lerner -- "Women were the first slaves" -- Funder considers the profoundly gendered nature of access to time. And she feels it very personally -- because she too is overloaded with wife stuff. Thinking of Eileen, she asks: "What did she give and what did it cost her? I find this question so chilling, coming out of twenty years of intense life-and-home-making, that I prefer to think it does not apply to me." But of course, it does.

Wifedom is not an academic book. There are references (not footnotes, but rather the kind that list sources according to page at the back); there's a bibliography; there's no index. It's very readable.



I last revisited George Orwell early this year in the shape of a very impressive Audible Original adaptation of 1984 (which I first encountered when I was at school). I was also still quite young when I read Down and Out in Paris and London; Animal Farm; and Burmese Days. In that famous list I drew up when we started drastically reducing our book collection, Orwell is annotated as "always a good read". Probably because of its political connotations, Homage to Catalonia (published in 1938) remained in my possession for longer. When that eventually took its leave, it was marked down as "brilliant". (I could have added that I found its account of the Spanish Civil War way more satisfying than Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls, published two years later.) I never read Keep the Apidistra Flying, but I did watch Robert Bierman's A Merry War, which is based on this novel.

Of Orwell's wife, however, I knew nothing. And that, it seems, is fairly typical. Eileen won a scholarship to Oxford, where she studied English (under J.R.R. Tolkien, among others). She began a Master of Psychology at University College London, but abandoned this when she married. The couple lived in a very basic cottage in Wallingford, Hertfordshire. Eileen looks after their hens, and their goat, and the little shop they run. She looks after George, who is often ill. And she looks after the cold and uncomfortable house. If things go wrong -- like the toilet, fairly revoltingly -- she fixes it. Plus, she edits and types for this author husband, who resents losing any writing time.

It's generally recognized that Orwell's work took a huge leap forward at about the time he married. Funder argues that this was anything but a coincidence.

Eileen's letters to Norah show her as humorous, strong, and self-reliant, someone who's not inclined to self-pity. But she tells it like it is: "Eric (I mean George) has just come in to say that the light is out (he had the Aladdin lamp because he was Working) and is there any oil (such a question) and I can't type in this light (which may be true, but I can't read it) and he is hungry and wants some cocoa and some biscuits and it is after midnight and Marx [the dog] is eating a bone and has left pieces in each chair and which shall he sit on now."

Good grief...

Funder: "Their disagreements had seemed to be about the trivialities of how to live... But now she sees that those wrangles were really about who would do the work: who would give the other time."


Huesca, 2020. Orwell fought in this locality in the Spanish Civil War

***

The way Funder tells it, when Orwell decides he's going to Spain to fight the fascists, there's no discussion. He just announces to Eileen that he's going, assuming she will look after things in Wallingford. She eventually finds someone to stand in for her, and goes to Spain herself. This Spanish interlude is very revealing in the way it "disappears" Eileen.

Funder comments: "I had read Homage twice and never registered that Eileen was in Spain. No one I have ever asked remembers her." She is there in Orwell's account. He mentions "my wife" a number of times, and kinder observers have said the anonymity was for Eileen's protection. But he doesn't point out the range of things she did there. She works for the Independent Labour Party, and organizes pretty much everything -- supplies, comms, banking... The independent Workers' Party of Marxist Unification (POUM) is fighting not only Franco, but also Stalin's communists. So there are spies everywhere, and in this dangerous environment, Eileen demonstrates nerves of steel. And she takes care of her husband when he's wounded: "Orwell spends 2500 words telling us of his hospital treatment without mentioning that Eileen was there." She is also the one who engineers their escape from Spain in June 1937.

In Homage, Orwell uses material she has given him, without attributing it or relating it to her: "Everything she is and does and knows," says Funder, "seems to be his for the taking... She's in this story only in a way no one will ever see."


Who did all this washing, we wonder...

Funder's central question is this: "How is a woman made to disappear?" Spain is only one element:

-- The passive voice is often the culprit. If you say, "Manuscripts are typed...," you don't have to acknowledge exactly who is doing the typing.
-- The biographers never clarify, in Funder's view, that it's Eileen's work that supports the couple during the first two years of WWII. (And her job in the Censorship Department of the Ministry of Information possibly inspired aspects of Nineteen Eighty-Four.) She later finds him freelance work in the same organization (her role again elided by his chroniclers).
-- He uses some of her observations for the opening of the essay Marrakesh.
-- And how influential was she in Animal Farm? This book is recognized as an outlier in his work. Is that because of Eileen's influence? Funder: "The strenuous way Orwell tries to bury her involvement is perhaps the most powerful testament to it. Eileen, he tells a friend much later, 'even helped in the planning of' the book. This is a theft-and-erasure mechanism: thanking someone for a minimal contribution while erasing a much greater one."

Nor is Eileen the only woman who is glossed over. Orwell's aunt helped to support him in Paris; author Lettice Cooper found him a job writing reviews for Time and Tide -- and often does the work for him... There definitely seems to be a bit of a pattern here...



***

Orwell is also a serial philanderer. He likes to kid himself his exploits have Eileen's "permission". Funder argues that wasn't the case. His behaviour towards women (he's prone to "pouncing", it seems, and is generally a bit of a predator) is reprehensible.

So why does Eileen put up with it? Patriarchy, says Funder... And acquiescence in what is effectively "doublethink". An economically and sexually exploitative private life coexists with a public life that is regarded as decent and upright -- and that's considered OK. It's all a "vast system of mental cheating", just like the utterly hypocritical colonial system that Orwell unmasked in his early service in Burma.

How can a man who sees through the artifices of empire remain so blithely unaware of the egregiously unequal power structures imposed by gender roles? That's an interesting question, and Funder would answer it by saying Orwell is fundamentally a misogynist. Brenda Salkeld, a longstanding friend and correspondent of Orwell's, commented after his death that he didn't like women, and was something of a sadist. Lettice Cooper describes him as "a very ingenuous and almost stupid man" (one biographer simply leaves out the "almost stupid" bit...)

Is it Orwell's fundamental disrespect and distaste for women or a British stiff upper lip that makes him appear so cavalier about Eileen's health? She hasn't been well for a while (it is thought she suffered from endometriosis). Orwell has disappeared off to France, leaving Eileen to deal with the court hearing for their recent adoption, and with the need for a hysterectomy. There's a truly awful letter to her husband about the proposed operation: "What worries me is that I really don't think I'm worth the money," she writes. Because she has been so ill, she should really have had a blood transfusion beforehand. But there's some reticence on her part about the whole thing: "Yesterday, I had a phase of thinking that it was outrageous to spend all your money on an operation of which I know you disapprove..."

As Funder comments: "This is the most terrifying letter."

Then there's the infinitely sad note that she writes when she's waiting for her operation. It didn't reach him, of course, until after she was dead.


That last communication...

I don't think it's fair to judge the way people show grief. Everyone does it differently. But it's certainly true that Orwell doesn't hang around in his search for a replacement wife... He tries several. Eventually, Sonia Brownell accepts.

***

Wifedom has inspired some quite contradictory reactions. For Susan Wyndham, it's "a brilliant, creative hybrid of life writing, feminist polemic and literary criticism, which upends the way we read". There are plenty of positive reviews.

Conversely, there has been some push-back against some of the claims made in the book (to the extent that later editions incorporated corrections).

And some reviewers have other concerns. Patrick Mullins wonders whether Funder does Orwell's biographers an injustice by failing to disaggregate them. They didn't all take the same view of the issues that are important to her, and they didn't all airbrush them either: "None of the six biographers is reticent about Orwell’s infidelity, his potential repressed homosexuality, his chauvinism and his racism, among other matters, yet the strength of the criticism for him on these and other fronts increases noticeably in volumes closer to the present day... They certainly have their blind spots, but they are not wholly blind to Eileen’s significance and Orwell’s treatment of her; nor are they uniform in what they do perceive."

Padraig Reidy argues that Orwell's biographers DID pay attention to Eileen's work in Spain, for example. And they didn't sugar-coat Orwell's problematic attitudes to women: "Even Christopher Hitchens devoted an entire chapter of Orwell’s Victory, his stirring apologia for Orwell, to the author’s issues with women, noting, among other things, that Orwell only ever used the word 'feminist' in a sneering manner. When even Christopher Hitchens is calling out your misogyny, you know you’re in trouble." I can't judge because I've not read any Orwell biographies, let alone a range of them. But this point comes up in a number of reviews, so you do have to wonder whether Funder's desire to get her message across interfered with the subtlety that biography requires.

Patrick Mullins also calls Funder out on her tendency to blur the line between fact and fiction. In the excruciating scene in Morocco, in which Orwell tells Eileen he deserves the "treat" of a Berber girl, and wants her to sanction this reward-to-self, Funder tells us bluntly: "I am imagining these details, but because this is what happened, there must have been some kind of scene." The sources are slim, though, says Mullins, arguably too slim to support Funder's interpretation: "None of the Orwell biographers declares emphatically that it happened. None of them denies with the same feeling that it did. Nonetheless, Funder finds their treatment wanting, accusing them of trying to 'excuse Orwell’s behaviour' and 'transmute fact to a rumour.'" Does she go too far in the other direction, though, concretizing what we're not totally sure about?

I'm always a little squirmy about fact/fiction blends, I have to say (see the discussion about E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime and Kaliane Bradley's The Ministry of Time). I guess I wouldn't like someone imagining their way into my life at some point in the future (not that anyone is ever likely to...)



***

Several critics (eg, here) pick up on what they regard as Wifedom's tendentious, overly polemic character. And yes, Funder does rather hit you over the head with her message. She very much sees herself reflected in Eileen. That definitely makes for a more impassioned book. I'm not sure it makes for a better one.

And yet the fact remains: All over the world, in all kinds of capacities, women are doing too much work for too little (or no) pay and too little (or no) credit. I would bet you any money that you've seen this happening among the people you know... So, no doubt Funder thought there's no point whispering about this. You need to shout it with the biggest megaphone you can find.

(I feel it's only fair to say at this juncture, by the way, that I have been incredibly lucky... From the very beginning, my partner and I shared household tasks. I cook and wash up, but he does the laundry; I iron, but then it's only my stuff that needs ironing; he does the finances, whereas I do the communication; when we travel, I do the research and planning, and he does the booking and paying; both of us share the cleaning, which means both of us do too little of it... When our professional commitments made us super-busy, we drafted in people to help. But at no time have all the domestic burdens been loaded onto just one person. True, we didn't have children, and the addition of small people to the household does seem to make it much harder to share equitably. But again, we've had friends who seem to have managed, often finding innovative ways to juggle two careers and family life. Where there's a will there's a way, but that will is going to be shaped by your culture and your era -- and in Eileen's case, there was insufficient societal pressure to give her a break.)



***

So, the message comes across at full volume. But does Funder actually succeed in restoring Eileen to her rightful position as the motor of Orwell's career?

Olivia Laing thinks not. She is troubled by Funder's "self-appointed task to piece Eileen back together", which, she says, deprives Orwell's wife of agency all over again: "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... 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."

Ben Clarke agrees, arguing that it was a mistake to compensate for a lack of Eileen’s own words by "reconstructing" what she felt: "The Eileen that emerges from [these creative passages] is less interesting, less assured, and has less agency than the one in the letters."

I definitely finished the book thinking, "Poor Eileen". Is that what Eileen would have wanted?

Rebecca Solnit comments: "Both [Sylvia] Topp [who wrote an earlier biography of Eileen] and Funder think Eileen’s marriage thwarted her ambitions; I credit her with choosing her path and have not seen evidence she wanted a different one. Yet the era crushed most women’s ambitions, often so thoroughly that they did not aspire in the first place."



***

What about the charge that Funder is retrospectively judging behaviour? Unfairly assessing Orwell's actions and the couple's marriage by the standards of our own era? Rebecca Solnit complains: "We are in an age of moralists; the standard question has become whether someone was virtuous, rather than whether they were interesting or useful or exhilarating. Some of this seems valuable for forming societies that are more inclusive and less abusive; some of it is reductive and beside the point."

But I think we HAVE to judge, no? Not in the sense of refusing to read anything that's "polluted" by non-PC ideas (there would be hardly anything left to read), but in the sense of saying: The way they talked of/dealt with/imagined XYX really sucked. Let's make sure we don't carry on doing that. (Conversely, we have to accept that WE, and our art, will be judged by future generations -- who will no doubt be asking: What in heaven's name did they think they were doing by ignoring the existential threat of climate change, and carrying on as though nothing was happening?)

The fact that the attitudes of a narrator and/or author seem reprehensible to us today doesn't preclude a book's status as great art. Its reflection of what seem to us today troubling values doesn't mean it can't still be moving/beautiful/insightful or whatever. Surely we can separate these things in our minds as we read? We CAN admire art while remaining cognizant of the shortcomings of its creators and/or their era.

Equally, it's only when we know something of the creator that we can really evaluate his/her work, I think. In the case of Orwell, his wife's life-story allows me to contextualize someone I've always thought of as progressive. He had terrific insight into the great big lie that underpinned colonialism, and into the tragedy that was already undermining communism -- but in other ways, says Gordon Bowker, one of his biographers, he was a traditionalist: "His attitude toward women and gay people was boorish and retrograde. Orwell’s friend and contemporary Stephen Spender noted that 'Orwell was very misogynist... a strange sort of eccentric man full of strange ideas and strange prejudices. One was that he thought that women were extremely inferior and stupid... He really rather despised women.' Orwell also opposed modern urban sprawl and machine technology. And most of his fiction, as well as his nonfiction, reveals a yen for Edwardian England, though stripped of some of its cruelties and inequalities."

Knowing that (which I confess I didn't) and knowing how those attitudes impacted on his wife -- all that will affect the way I read Orwell in the future. But will it stop me reading and appreciating his work? No, of course not.

In conclusion, I think Funder's book is flawed to some degree. But she taught me something interesting. And her general message resonates: Stop the doublethink, and stop the subordination of women.

In this era, it's a message that needs to be trumpeted ever louder and ever clearer.