Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Imaginary Life is both an engaging biography, inventive in its style, and a work that asks a bigger question about how often women are simply written out of the collective consciousness. As Anna Funder puts it, this is an exploration of how a woman can be “buried first by domesticity, and then by history … cancelled by patriarchy”.
Having read the six major biographies of George Orwell, Funder was dismayed by a lack of engagement with Orwell’s own professed feelings about women, and about his wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy: a screed in his notebook describes “incorrigible dirtiness” and a “terrible devouring sexuality”. This – and the discovery of a sheaf of letters written by Eileen O’Shaughnessy to her best friend during the period of her marriage to Orwell – provides the spark to ignite Funder’s curiosity.
What she finds is an extraordinary woman: a bright, one-time Oxford scholar, influential on her husband (in 1934, she wrote a dystopian poem called End Of The Century, 1984) and brilliant in her own right. Wifedom picks O’Shaughnessy’s life out in illuminating detail, reproducing her letters, providing embellishments, adding colour without ever painting over her subject.
Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Imaginary Life, Anna Funder (Viking)
Price: £20/£9.99 Ebook/£13 audiobook. Info: here
words HUGH RUSSELL