Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life Anna Funder. Review

Orwell might well have found love demanding, but as Funder unsparingly reveals, those who loved him – in particular his first wife Eileen O’Shaughnessy – had by far the rawer deal.
Spurred in part by her discovery that Homage to Catalonia, about Orwell’s time fighting in the Spanish Civil War, not simply ignored the presence and courage of his wife but went out of its way to conceal it, Funder’s engaging and passionate account of this overlooked woman is her attempt to paint her back into the picture.

It is an act of sisterly resurrection that, almost inevitably, tarnishes Orwell’s gilded reputation. 
Written in a fusion of autobiography, conventional biography and fictional scenes, Wifedom is many books rolled into one. What it is not, is anything like previous accounts of Orwell. Funder navigates by two guiding stars: the first is the recent discovery of six letters from Eileen to her best friend Norah Symes Myles, a fellow student at Oxford University, which are interleaved throughout and allow Eileen’s voice to reach us unfiltered. 
The second is the raft of major Orwell biographies by the likes of Peter Stansky, Bernard Crick and DJ Taylor: “Orwell’s biographers are seven men looking at a man. Each of them is brilliant … but all of them minimise the importance of the women in Orwell’s life. In the end, the biographies seemed like fictions of omission.”

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As Orwell’s life and marriage unfold, the gaps, obfuscations and fudges these accounts contain are mercilessly exposed by Funder, who skewers their inadequacies. At the same time, the author uses what she discovers to illuminate her own marriage, in which she has found herself doing “the lion’s share” of domestic and childcare duties, despite previously agreeing with her architect husband that they would share them equally.

I’m not sure such insights add much. Indeed, a purely factual biography might arguably have served Eileen best, keeping the focus firmly upon her, without the need to draw links between her time and ours. 
Well-known for her first book, Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall, Funder has a distinctive, commanding style. At times, however, it can be wearing.

The relentless drum-beat narrative of the neglectful husband whose work consumes his wife as well as him is too often amplified to suggest that Eileen’s experience is a mirror in which all women in relationships with men can find their own image: “The individual man can be the loveliest; the system will still benefit him without his having to lift a finger or a whip, or change the sheets …” 
Where it works well is in her painstaking restoration of Eileen, and her evocation of the talented, charismatic and selfless woman who played a crucial part in helping Orwell (nee Eric Blair) become the writer he did. With Eileen’s letters to Norah covering 1936-45, Wifedom offers an imaginative, gripping and sometimes enraging account of a dysfunctional marriage.

Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life (Image: free)

As Eileen wrote: “Eric had decided that he mustn’t let his work be interrupted & complained bitterly when we’d been married a week that he’d only done two good days’ work out of seven.”
Orwell’s time in Spain is illuminated by discovering the importance of Eileen’s work as secretary at the Independent Labour Party headquarters in Barcelona, and the dangers she faced alone, not least of them spies and marauding gangs of armed men. 
She also spent three days at the front alongside her husband, and helped nurse him after he had been shot in the throat, although none of that made it into Homage to Catalonia: “The way the text buckles and strains to avoid her is the way I can see the shape she left.” 
Back in Britain, the story continues with Eileen as bread-winner, enduring Orwell’s many infidelities. This was not an open marriage, despite what his biographers might have hoped, and his ceaseless straying caused Eileen misery. While living briefly in Morocco, he could not conceal his fascination with Berber women. Eventually he told Eileen he wanted to have one of them, and did so. 
With a novelist’s eye, Funder recreates the dreariness and terror of wartime London; not that the Orwells seemed petrified. From the rooftop they would watch the bombs falling, rather than take shelter. With the scene switching between London and their freezing country cottage in Hertfordshire, she shows the extent to which Eileen allowed Orwell the time and space in which to work, not to mention typing up his handwritten manuscripts. 

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When Animal Farm was published, its dramatic change in tone led the couple’s friend Tosco Fyvel to write: “a tale so perfect in its light touch and restraint (almost ‘unOrwellian’), I think some of the credit is due to the conversational influence of Eileen and the light touch of her bright, humorous intelligence”.
Although Orwell writing Eileen out of Homage to Catalonia was less than truthful, and his infidelities badly hurt her, most disturbing of all is learning how little he did to help when she fell seriously ill. By the time the couple had adopted a baby son, Richard, Eileen was suffering regular haemorrhages. 
She needed care and attention, none of which Orwell provided. Instead, he left for Paris. Back home, Eileen was arranging for a major operation. The letter she wrote to him explaining her decision, and trying to justify the cost, is devastating. Self-effacing barely begins to describe how little she thought of herself throughout this challenging marriage.

Almost 80 years after her death, Funder has refused to take her at her own estimation, and has finally given her the prominence and respect she deserves. The question is, how many other influential women remain, like buried treasure, still to see the light of day?