Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life by Anna Funder
On losing George Orwell, finding Eileen O’Shaughnessy, and making powerful narrative choices
Wifedom is a wicked magic trick we have learned to play on ourselves. I want to expose how it is done and so take its wicked, tricking power away.
Anna Funder
George Orwell has long been one of my literary heroes for his powerful dystopian narratives and searing insights into state corruption and control. I’ve read Animal Farm and 1984 numerous times, as well as his 1946 essay ‘Why I Write’. However, I’ve never peeked behind the curtain to find out more about Orwell’s life, so I was excited to read Anna Funder’s Wifedom, which sets about extricating Orwell’s forgotten wife Eileen from a smattering of personal letters and secondary sources, re-presenting her and reinserting her into her rightful place in literary history.
The structure of Wifedom is unique, incorporating fiction, biography, letters, Anna Funder’s own memoir, and feminist commentary and revisioning. Orwell does not come out of it well. He is cruel, needy, misogynistic, selfish, capable of relentless sexual harassment and an attempted rape. At least this much can be gleaned from the documents and recollections that have stood the test of time. Which begs the question, if so much can be so easily exposed, how many more gory details are permanently lost because of the women who kept silent? Furthermore, it transpires that Eileen was an intellectual in her own right, winning a scholarship and earning an English degree from Oxford at a time when women were hardly admitted to higher education (in contrast with her husband, who didn’t attend university at all). She is thought by some to have collaborated with Orwell to write Animal Farm, and she also wrote a poem called ‘End of the Century, 1984’ years before Orwell began his most famous work. How much of Orwell’s work, perception and imagination should actually be attributed to his wife?
Funder presents her findings to us and allows them to speak for themselves, while also overlaying them with self-reflection on her own experience of wifedom, including the disconcerting ways in which women still experience being sidelined and silenced in modern society, and even play an unwitting part in perpetuating their own exclusion. Her examination moves constantly from research and personal reflection into a fictional reimagining of different scenes between Orwell and Eileen, and it’s this creative decision that made me pause to reflect on the effect of such narrative choices.
The benefit of using fiction to explore Orwell and Eileen’s relationship is that it allows Funder, and her readers, to get so much closer to Eileen. We can be privy to her most intimate moments and experience the minutiae of her life, those small thoughts, gestures and conversations that ultimately say so much about a person and a marriage. Without this, we would be stuck viewing Eileen forever at a distance, capable of acknowledging her across a new bridge of historical awareness, but unable to cross over to get closer. However, rewriting Eileen into fiction is a bold move. It remakes her as a character in another writer’s imagination, since we can’t possibly know how close to the truth some of these scenes are. Does that muddle the effectiveness of Funder’s revisionism?
Perhaps Funder is inviting us to join her in exploring the messiness of it all, the difficulties of extracting truth from bias and self-perception. Should we believe wholly in Funder’s fictional accounts of Orwell and Eileen’s marriage, or is she showing us how easily we can begin to impose our imagination onto the lives of other human beings? In creating such unique narrative interplay, Funder offers her fellow writers a gift. By exposing the incredible power of storytellers, and the different ways in which stories are formed, we are prompted to think more deeply about what we readily accept as truth, and what we might call into question.
Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life by Anna Funder is published by Penguin and on sale now.