In the summer of 2017, Anna Funder found herself sinking under the weight of a to-do list that would be familiar to any working mother: three children; house repairs; elderly relatives; visiting family – all with “work deadlines ticking under every waking minute”. Seeking respite from this domestic “peak overload”, Funder – a human-rights lawyer whose first nonfiction book, Stasiland, won the Samuel Johnson prize in 2004 and whose novel All That I Am was shortlisted for the Impac Dublin award and the Commonwealth Book prize – is drawn back to George Orwell, a writer she has “long loved”. She turns to Orwell’s life and work in the hope of boosting her own flagging writerly mojo, but her attention snags unexpectedly on a previously unremarked absence: the figure of his wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy. “How is it that she remains invisible?”
There are numerous difficulties in bringing Eileen back into focus, Funder soon discovers. The most obvious is that her achievements and contributions have been consistently downplayed or omitted, not only by the six major biographies of Orwell (all written by men), but by Orwell himself, both in his published works and his private notebooks.
