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.
