Wifedom may seem an old-fashioned word these days. But be assured that Anna Funder – the Australian author of Stasiland, human rights lawyer, decoder of doublethink – gives it a slashing edge. Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life is a brilliant, creative hybrid of life writing, feminist polemic and literary criticism, which upends the way we read.
In 2017, “at a moment of peak overload” in her family and stalled in her stellar writing career, Funder bought a first edition of George Orwell’s Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters. An admirer of this exposer of tyranny – most famously in his novels Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four – she was provoked by his essay on the writer’s life to follow his trail back to her own, buried as it was under the “motherload of wifedom”.
