BookBrowse Reviews Wifedom by Anna Funder

BookBrowse:

A unique and original blend of biography, fiction, and literary criticism reveals the legacy of Eileen Blair, George Orwell's first wife, whose unacknowledged sacrifices made his meteoric success possible.

When life became overwhelming for writer, wife, and mother Anna Funder in the summer of 2017, she turned to her favorite writer for clarity of vision. Reading George Orwell in the summer led to reading six biographies of his life in the autumn, which revealed a curiously overlooked woman who ultimately captured Funder's heart. In Wifedom: Mrs. Orwell's Invisible Life, Funder unearths the story of Eileen Blair (née O'Shaughnessy)—the brave, complex, and talented woman "buried first by domesticity and then by history."

Wifedom is many things: literary criticism, feminist theory, memoir, and "counterfiction" that recreates the terrifically (and tragically) one-sided marriage of Eileen and Eric Blair (Orwell's real name). Inspired by the 2005 discovery of six new letters written from Eileen to her best friend, Norah Symes Myles, Funder provides a rousing rebuttal to the six major biographies of Orwell—all written by men—that did not have the advantage of the letters' contents. Eileen's voice in the letters is "electrifying" to Funder, and reveals that Orwell married a woman with writerly instincts and a brilliant mind who could creatively shape his own vision. But why did all the biographies and, indeed, George's own writing minimize and erase Eileen? Funder's book attempts an answer as it also mines the emotional ore of her own existence:

"As a writer, the unseen work of a great writer's wife fascinates me … But as a woman and a wife her [Eileen] life terrifies me. I see in it a life-and-death struggle between maintaining her self, and the self-sacrifice and self-effacement so lauded of women in patriarchy."

In the fall of 1936, the Orwells are newlyweds and arguing, as Eileen reports to Norah, dryly asserting she could "save time & and just write one letter to everyone when the murder or separation had been accomplished." These words begin the clutch of letters to her friend that Funder weaves into the narrative that spans the Spanish Civil War through the Second World War. They provide a direct line to Eileen's voice, which Funder reinforces by italicizing Eileen's words in her letters to Norah.

As it turned out, their marriage was a tumultuous nine-year endeavor marred by infidelity (his), bad health (both), chronic money worries, and never-ending physical labor (mostly hers). In a cold and isolated sixteenth century farm cottage forty miles north of London, it fell upon Eileen to tend George, the garden, and the animals, as well as to read, edit, and type up George's indecipherable manuscripts. Funder vividly imagines Eileen in these moments, channeling the effervescent deadpan of the letters into a real woman, who in rare, quiet moments ponders the life she sacrificed to support an unfaithful yet brilliant man.

The couple were only months into their marriage when the Spanish Civil War erupted and George announced he was leaving to fight the Fascist forces. Eileen followed and joined the resistance, but she is hard to locate in Orwell's writing of the time. Thus, Funder dug into the footnotes, original sources, and even visited Barcelona to trace Eileen's steps and "piece together her war": how she spent three nights at the front "and loved it," took care of the soldiers, and still made time to pick up "little luxuries to send to him [George] at the front."  Yet in Homage to Catalonia, George's book about his experience in the war, Eileen is nearly invisible (see Beyond the Book):

"When I read Homage to Catalonia again, it was with a sense of bewilderment that she was nowhere to be seen. This lucid, honest and self-deprecating book now felt like a half-truth."

When World War II broke out, Eileen took a job in the Censorship Department of the Ministry of Information (whose building in London likely influenced Orwell's "Ministry of Truth" in Nineteen Eighty-Four, Funder surmises). Detailing the subtle ways Eileen influenced George's writing, her endless physical drudgery, and the debilitating uterine bleeding that she suffered stoically for years, Funder ultimately comes to see "their arms race to mutual self-destruction: she by selflessness, and he by disappearing into the greedy double life that is the artist's, of self + work."

This is an unabashedly feminist book, and Funder posits brave and original observations on the nature of patriarchy and power. She cleverly inverts Orwell's notorious concept of Doublethink—the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them—to describe the role of women, particularly wives, who ostensibly have the same human rights as men but whose "lesser amounts of time and money and status and safety tell us we do not." In Funder's estimation, women's lived experience "makes a lie of the rhetoric of the world. We live on the dark side of Doublethink."

There is pain, sadness, and anger in Wifedom, an acute recognition of the ways "wifedom" can be a "wicked magic trick" that obscures and omits the sacrifices of women. In retrieving Eileen Blair "from behind the Cerberus," Funder puts her squarely back in frame as her own person and not just "Mrs. Orwell."

This review first ran in the September 6, 2023 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.