In the summer of 2017, Anna Funder found herself sinking under the weight of a to-do list that would be familiar to any working mother: three children; house repairs; elderly relatives; visiting family – all with “work deadlines ticking under every waking minute”. Seeking respite from this domestic “peak overload”, Funder – a human-rights lawyer whose first nonfiction book, Stasiland, won the Samuel Johnson prize in 2004 and whose novel All That I Am was shortlisted for the Impac Dublin award and the Commonwealth Book prize – is drawn back to George Orwell, a writer she has “long loved”. She turns to Orwell’s life and work in the hope of boosting her own flagging writerly mojo, but her attention snags unexpectedly on a previously unremarked absence: the figure of his wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy. “How is it that she remains invisible?”
There are numerous difficulties in bringing Eileen back into focus, Funder soon discovers. The most obvious is that her achievements and contributions have been consistently downplayed or omitted, not only by the six major biographies of Orwell (all written by men), but by Orwell himself, both in his published works and his private notebooks.
When Eileen met Eric Blair at a party in 1935, she was an Oxford graduate, supporting herself financially while studying for a masters in psychology; after their marriage, she gave it up to live in a remote cottage with a smallholding, taking care of the animals and her husband and living on the pittance from Orwell’s freelance work. As Funder sees it, Eileen abandoned her own talent to nurture her husband’s: “His work was her purpose. He and it were in the place where she and hers should have been.”
The available information about Eileen is barely sufficient for a biography (though in 2020 Sylvia Topp crowdfunded her book Eileen: The Making of George Orwell, which Funder acknowledges in passing). Funder locates her subject “in scraps of facts”. She toys with the idea of writing a “counterfiction”: “But I continued to be fascinated by the sly ways she’d been hidden, and a novel couldn’t show those.” Nor could a novel do justice to the only surviving examples of Eileen’s voice – six letters, discovered in 2005, written to her best friend, Norah Myles: “It would devour the letters as ‘material’ and privilege my voice over hers. And Eileen’s voice is electrifying. I wanted to make her live, and at the same time to reveal the wicked magic trick that had erased her.”
The result is electrifying in its own right: a genre-melding hybrid that allows Eileen’s likeness to be partially recovered through her own words and the testimonies of those who remembered her, as well as reimagined in fictional passages to flesh out the gaps in the record. Funder revisits episodes familiar from Orwell’s accounts and flips the perspective, retracing the stories back to the sources to show us Eileen’s role – most obviously in her careful reconstruction of the time they spent in Spain in 1936.
Orwell’s experiences of the revolution are well documented in Homage to Catalonia, where he mentions briefly that, while he was fighting, “my wife was in Barcelona”. What he doesn’t say is that Eileen was working at the headquarters of the Independent Labour party, a position with significant responsibility and risk attached. Funder wonders how she could have read Homage twice before and not realised Eileen’s political work, until she searches the text. “Orwell mentions ‘my wife’ 37 times. And then I see: not once is Eileen named.”
But she avoids outright hostility to Orwell, despite detailing the casual cruelty with which he often treated his wife. Part of her aim is “to see how men can imagine themselves innocent in a system that benefits them, at others’ cost” – particularly a man such as Orwell, whom she has always thought of as “on my side” in his championing of the exploited. This championing does not extend to interrogating the power dynamic between men and women, an area in which Orwell demonstrates textbook “doublethink”: “Patriarchy is the doublethink that allows an apparently ‘decent’ man to behave badly to women.”
The book is a painstaking work of restoration, of retrieving Eileen “from under the ignoring, minimising and passive-voicing”, and a work of this nature must, by definition, contain much that is purely speculative. The imagined scenes are so closely interwoven with the biographical, and with the author’s first-person reflections, that the real Mrs Orwell still feels somewhat elusive even at the end; you close the book wondering how much of what you just read was true. But that is the point; so much of what Eileen thought and felt can never be known, and informed speculation is all we have.
“To write this book I have used another voice for parts of it – Eileen’s – because I lost the one I had,” Funder says. She is an accomplished stylist but her prose is most alive in these fictional sections, so much so that at times I found myself wishing she had written a complete novel in this voice. And yet it’s hard to imagine a form other than this intricate collage, incorporating both Orwell’s and Eileen’s words into a bigger picture, that would have done her subject justice. Wifedom is a vital, if incomplete, portrait of a woman whose unseen work was instrumental in the creation of books that became cornerstones of 20th-century literature, the extent of her contribution impossible to measure, obscured as it is by the role of “wife”.
Wifedom by Anna Funder is published by Viking (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
