George Orwell’s first wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy, made his work possible at the cost of her own by taking on the household drudgery and typing up his writing instead of completing her master’s in psychology. But Wifedom, a remarkable new book by Anna Funder, shows there was much more to a woman who appears only fleetingly in her husband’s work and is poorly served by his biographers. Shortly before meeting Orwell she wrote a dystopian poem titled End of the Century, 1984; she suggested that he write an animal fable instead of an essay denouncing Stalinism; and she noted her husband’s “extraordinary political simplicity”. In Homage to Catalonia, Orwell mentions a shopping trip they make to buy stockings in Barcelona – but not that she had a political job in the offices of Poum (the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification), for whom he fought in the civil war; nor that she took significant risks to get them and others out of the country after Stalin ordered his men to liquidate the party. She took risks, too, to save the manuscript.
Funder greatly admires Orwell’s work; she does not want it to be “cancelled” by her unflattering portrait of him, especially his shoddy treatment of his wife. But she also notes that O’Shaughnessy “has been cancelled already – by patriarchy”; that is, “buried first by domesticity, and then by history”. Funder says she writes for the same reasons Orwell himself gave – “because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention”. Since the subject’s short life has left fewer traces than her husband’s, Funder enriches the facts with brief, novelistic sketches, allowing us to see this invisible woman anew.
