Excerpt from Wifedom by Anna Funder, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

I looked back at the page.

'After the age of about thirty,' Orwell writes, most people 'abandon individual ambition – in many cases, indeed, they almost abandon the sense of being individuals at all – and live chiefly for others, or are simply smothered under drudgery.'

'Anna?' I looked up into the wet shadow of Benoît and handed over my credit card – to buy time, with ice cream.

'But there is also,' Orwell continues, 'the minority of gifted, wilful people who are determined to live their own lives to the end, and writers belong in this class.'

If I couldn't see my own fury clearly enough yet to excise it, I thought, at least I could give it company. And then:

My starting point is always a feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice. When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, 'I am going to produce a work of art.' I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention ...

I closed the book. I had a plan. If my three children – two teens and a tween – were going to emerge from childhood and see me for what I am, I would have to become visible to myself. I would look under the motherload of wifedom I had taken on, and see who was left. I would read Orwell on the tyrannies, the 'smelly little orthodoxies' of his time, and I would use him to liberate myself from mine.

As summer shifted into autumn I read the six major biographies of Orwell, published between the 1970s and 2003. They are by Peter Stansky and William Abrahams (1972 and 1979), Bernard Crick (1980), Michael Shelden (1991), Jeffrey Meyers (2001), D. J. Taylor (2003) and Gordon Bowker (also 2003). I've long loved Orwell's writing so it was a joy to learn about the man described as 'one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century', and 'a moral force, a light glinting in the darkness, a way through the murk'. I read of Orwell's childhood in the 1910s, his time at Eton, then in Burma as a young policeman. I read that he married Eileen O'Shaughnessy in 1936, fought the fascists in the Spanish Civil War, then lived in London under fascist bombardment there, writing his masterpiece, Animal Farm, and, later, the dystopian marvel Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Then, as winter set in, I came to this, which Orwell wrote during his final illness, after the marriage was over. He wrote it in his private literary notebook, in the third person, as if to distance himself from feelings that were hard to own.

There were two great facts about women which ... you could only learn by getting married, & which flatly contradicted the picture of themselves that women had managed to impose upon the world. One was their incorrigible dirtiness & untidiness. The other was their terrible, devouring sexuality ... Within any marriage or regular love affair, he suspected that it was always the woman who was the sexually insistent partner. In his experience women were quite insatiable, & never seemed fatigued by no matter how much love-making ... In any marriage of more than a year or two's standing, intercourse was thought of as a duty, a service owed by the man to the woman. And he suspected that in every marriage the struggle was always the same – the man trying to escape from sexual intercourse, to do it only when he felt like it (or with other women), the woman demanding it more & more, & more & more consciously despising her husband for his lack of virility.

Orwell only ever lived with one wife. These comments refer to Eileen.

I scoured the biographies. Some of them include parts of this extract. Could they help work out what was going on? One of them follows it with this observation: 'Referring later to a notorious Edwardian murderer, he wrote of "the sympathy everyone feels for a man who murders his wife" – clearly Orwell in misogynist mood (even if ironically so), a mood he normally made an effort to muffle or suppress.' This was bewildering, and not much help. Another biographer implies it's fictional, possibly 'passages for some other novel or short story, of mildly sadistic sexual fantasy'. But then, perhaps worried by Orwell's confessed 'lack of virility', he tries to blame women for that, saying that these comments 'reflect upon a type of woman who is sexually over-demanding'. Less than helpful. A third biographer writes: 'Wives, [Orwell] suggested, use sex as a means of controlling their husbands.' This is the misogynist trope of a woman 'controlling' a man when what she is controlling is access to her own body – so, no help at all, particularly when Orwell is saying he does not want his wife's body. There seemed to be no way for the biographers to deal with the anti-woman, anti-wife, antisex rant other than by leaving it out, sympathising with the impulse, trivialising it as a 'mood', denying it as 'fiction' or blaming the woman herself.

Excerpted from Wifedom by Anna Funder. Copyright © 2023 by Anna Funder. Excerpted by permission of Knopf. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.