After spending a summer reading George Orwell in between looking after her teenage children, the Australian author and former human rights lawyer Anna Funder observed how few references the Nineteen Eighty-Four author made to the women in his life. She was especially dismayed by the absence of Eileen O’Shaughnessy, Orwell’s first wife, who joined her husband on research trips and who died while undergoing surgery aged 39. And so in the genre-bending Wifedom – which has been shortlisted for the Gordon Burn prize – Funder moves “from the work to the life, from the man to the wife”.
The book is both a heartfelt memoir of Funder’s struggles with the concept of “wifedom” and a biography of the first Mrs Orwell, who typed and gave feedback on her husband’s manuscripts in between chores at their freezing Hertfordshire cottage. Funder draws heavily on the letters O’Shaughnessy wrote to her friend Norah Symes, boldly – and controversially – fleshing them out to give a more detailed picture of the couple’s life together.
Arianwen Parkes-Lockwood is the principal narrator, conveying Funder’s frustration at the invisible labour shouldered by O’Shaughnessy and the irony of Orwell’s dubious treatment of women, given his wider beliefs about power and inequality. Meanwhile, Jane Slavin reads O’Shaughnessy’s letters, which portray a charismatic woman not so much downtrodden as pluckily making the best of things in trying circumstances. In one letter, written early in their marriage, O’Shaughnessy reveals how she and Orwell fought so much that “I thought I’d save time and just write one letter to everyone when the murder or separation had been accomplished”.
• Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life is available via Penguin Audio, 12hr 39min
Further listening
House of Flame and Shadow
Sarah J Maas, Audible Studios, 29hr 42min
The third book in Maas’s Crescent City series finds heroine Bryce Quinlan alone in a hostile new world and determined to get back to her family. Read by Elizabeth Evans.
The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read
Philippa Perry, Penguin Audio, 8hr 52min
The psychotherapist and agony aunt narrates her book on how parents can raise children without repeating the potentially harmful habits of their own parents.
• This article was amended on 23 February 2024. An earlier version used a photo of George Orwell’s second wife, Sonia Orwell, rather than Eileen O’Shaughnessy.
