By Lizz Sayers
George Orwell, author of Animal Farm and 1984, has long been praised for his ability to question authority and the hypocritical institutions that support it. In 1984, he famously coined the term doublethink as the ability to hold contrary opinions or beliefs at the same time, especially as a result of political indoctrination. But now the tables have turned on Orwell in Anna Funder’s latest literary offering Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life. Part biography, part historical fiction and part portrait of a wasted talent, Funder’s creative retelling demonstrates how Orwell himself employed doublethink to entrench his wife in patriarchy and to see her as the lesser sex, despite her fierce intellect and many achievements.
Wifedom fleshes out the story of Eileen O’Shaughnessy, wife of Eric Blair (Orwell’s real name) and silent partner in the creation of his alter-ego literary giant, George Orwell. Eileen’s existence was largely left out of the history books despite the fact that she had an enormous impact on Orwell as a fellow writer and collaborator. She was also the brawn behind turning Orwell into one of the most significant literary figures of the 20th century.
Eileen and Eric meet at a party and are married shortly thereafter. The attraction for Eric is a no-brainer: Eileen is smart, quick-witted and practical. She is an emerging writer herself, a seasoned scholar, and she enjoys editing her brother’s medical papers. She’s also pretty and caring. For Eileen, the attraction is more pragmatic. She’s pushing thirty and has a secret bet with herself that she will marry the first man who proposes to her at this milestone age. She’s curious by nature and Eric is an enigma of a man. He’s also charming but sickly, chain-smoking hand-rolled cigarettes and plagued by a hacking cough. (Orwell had tuberculosis but hid this from public knowledge.) Eileen sees his literary potential and he becomes her pet project. The rest becomes history.
Funder is well-known for diving into deep subject matter. As the author of Stasiland and All That I Am, she has tackled the murky history of the Stasi regime and Nazi Germany alike. This time around, it’s patriarchy. Wifedom is conceived when Funder finds herself in a bit of a funk, and to comfort herself, she decides to read Orwell. She reads his novels and political essays and devours the many biographies written about him. Then she stumbles across six letters written by his wife, Eileen to her best friend Norah Symes Myles. The letters span the period of their marriage from 1936 to 1945. Funder is blown away by the wit of this Oxford-educated woman and sets about researching the events of this period from the missing perspective of Eileen. To reconstruct her narrative, Funder employs a mix of Eileen’s letters, plausible imaginings of Eileen’s life with Orwell and Funder’s own experience as a wife. The result is mind-blowing. For anyone who has felt the suffocating stranglehold of patriarchy, it truly is holding a mirror up to society, then and now. Funder writes:
Patriarchy is the doublethink that allows an apparently ‘decent’ man to behave badly to women, in the same way that colonialism and racism are the systems that allow apparently ‘decent’ people to do unspeakable things to other people. In order for men to do their deeds and be innocent of them at the same time, women must be human – but not fully so, or a ‘sense of falsity and hence of guilt’ would set in. So women are said to have the same human rights as men, but our lesser amounts of time and money and status and safety tell us we do not. Women, too must keep two contradictory things in our heads at all times: I am human, but I am also less than human. Our lived experience makes a lie of the rhetoric of the world.
I listened to Wifedom on audiobook and I’m so glad I did. It was the perfect medium to tell this story. There are two narrators—one is used for Eileen’s voice (which includes the character of Eileen and the original letters that the real Eileen wrote) and one for the omniscient narrator who takes on the point of view of Orwell and other characters in the book. The result of the two narrators adds authenticity to the reading so that we really feel we are inside Eileen’s head and we are suffering along with her.
Funder draws heavily on other biographies about Orwell to flesh out the story. She finds that through their omissions, she is able to find Eileen. She becomes so good at looking for the invisible, she learns the tropes of these (mostly male) biographers. A sentence with no subject prompts her to look for Eileen. ‘Manuscripts were typed’ makes her question by whom? The contemporary notion of invisible work is on full display here. Funder brings Eileen to life through the mundane, back-breaking chores that she does to support George. They live in an off-grid cottage with no electricity in the middle of an English winter. The plates are literally frozen in the sink. Eileen does all the domestic chores, while Orwell spends all his time writing and convalescing from his latest bout of sickness. She is his cleaner, nursemaid, repairman, editor, mentor and moral compass.
This book does more for feminism than any other work of fiction. It slowly builds the case study of patriarchy’s devastating effects over the course of the story, ending with Eileen’s death from neglect (she is failed by George and her doctors). She herself has a serious medical condition—severe monthly bleeds—but plays her health down constantly. Despite the fact that Eileen is severely unwell and they have just adopted a son, Richard, Orwell goes on an expedition to Spain during the war. Meanwhile, Eileen checks herself quietly into hospital with a second-rate surgeon for a hysterectomy even though her London doctors advise against it. She is too weak, and the risk of bleeding out is too extreme. Yet Eileen goes to the budget hospital that has no blood on standby for her and dies on the operating table. One of her final letters in the book is addressed to Orwell concerning the cost of the operation, and it is gut-wrenching:
This is all a bit difficult. It is going to cost a terrible lot of money … but what worries me is that I don’t really think I’m worth the money. On the other hand this thing will take a longish time to kill me if left alone and it will be costing some money the whole time.
The real tragedy here is that Eileen dies without knowing her real worth. And up until now, the history books did not realise it either. Without Funder’s intervention, we would never know that the plot for Animal Farm came from a collaboration with Eileen, from nights spent laying together and cooking up the perfect farmyard fable to parody the communist party. Or that 1984 was the title of a poem written by Eileen before she met Orwell, and his novel of the same name is set in a world very similar to Eileen’s workplace, the Ministry of Information’s Censorship Department in London, during World War II. It is only through Funder weaving her own special brand of magic, that Eileen is able to step back into the narrative and claim the accolades that she deserves.
Wifedom: Mrs. Orwell’s Invisible Life was first published by Penguin Random House in 2023 and has an RRP of $36.99. It is available from most online and local retailers.
Lizz Sayers is a recent graduate of the Creative Writing, Editing and Publishing Masters at the University of Melbourne.
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