In the summer of 2017, Anna Funder found herself “at a moment of peak overload”. Juggling the competing demands of getting her children ready for the new school year, grocery shopping, home maintenance and caring for members of her extended family, Funder felt she had been spiritually drained by the monotonous demands of motherhood.
After stumbling across a copy of Orwell’s collected essays in a secondhand bookshop, she embarked on a project of re-reading his work, hoping his explorations of tyranny would help her liberate herself from the “motherload of wifedom I had taken on”.
