There’s a line of poetry that’s been bobbing about at the back of my head for at least 30 years: “It can’t have been fun for the Buddha’s wife, Left on her own for the rest of her life.” Ruth Silcock’s poem bemoans the fate of the wives of Great Men, sidelined or neglected while their busy husbands are exalted. By the 1990s, the idea that the role of wife represented an aspect of patriarchal oppression was pervasive and uncontroversial. Hardly surprising: it had been a cornerstone of feminist thought ever since Charlotte Perkins Gilman lifted the lid on wifedom and servitude with Women and Economics in 1898 or, for that matter, Mary Wollstonecraft insisted women were more than male property in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman back in 1792.
I’ve been wondering lately if feminism is subject to a Groundhog Day-style curse in which all previous knowledge is periodically obliterated. In 2017, the writer Anna Funder, best known for Stasiland, found herself bitterly metabolising the revelations of #MeToo, cognisant for the first time that she as a wife had taken up the lion’s share of parenting and housework. She turned to George Orwell for insight into her oppression, only to discover lurking in the shadows the emblematic figure of his wife, Eileen, whose story she seizes on as a way of exorcising her feelings.
Eileen O’Shaughnessy was a clever, Oxford-educated, independent-minded girl from a comfortable background. She encountered Orwell at a party in 1935 and was so charmed by this tall, ungainly, moth-eaten man that when he proposed at their next meeting she said yes. They set up shop, literally, in a primitive cottage in rural Hertfordshire, where it rapidly became apparent that Eileen was expected to serve as editor, cook, shopkeeper, hen wrangler, cesspit swiller and devoted nurse (Orwell was plagued by chest infections, as yet undiagnosed as the tuberculosis that would kill him).
The degree to which she relished her new life can be judged by a witty letter, one of a clutch of six that surfaced in 2005, to her best friend Norah Symes: “I lost the habit of punctual correspondence during the first few weeks of marriage because we quarrelled so continuously & really bitterly that I thought I’d save time and write one letter to everyone when the murder or separation had been accomplished.” Humour of a very dry sort is Eileen’s armour, her mode of passage through increasingly threadbare and alarming times.
Within a year, Orwell had volunteered in the Spanish civil war. Eileen followed him, determined not to be stuck at home in charge of the potato crop. Orwell served with POUM, a left-Communist party soon blacklisted by Stalin and subjected to a terrifying purge. In Funder’s account, Eileen emerges from the margins to which Orwell consigned her in Homage to Catalonia. It seems she may have been more politically engaged than him, effectively running the POUM offices and taking enormous personal risks when the purge began.
Eileen continued to write her sly, astringent letters through the second world war, finding occasions for amused self-mockery even as bombs began to fall. She worked at the Ministry of Information, a job she loathed, in order to keep her ill, broke husband afloat. Friends recognised her witty fingerprints all over Animal Farm, originally planned by Orwell as a plain-speaking account of the iniquities of Stalinism. Her beloved brother was killed in France and she was often unwell, perilously underweight and suffering massive bleeds that may have been caused by endometriosis. Despite this, in the summer of 1944 she agreed to Orwell’s newfound desire to adopt a child, taking up the heavy lifting of parenthood alone when he decided to go to Europe as a reporter, a departure so abrupt he missed the adoption hearing.
Her last letters to Orwell make painful reading. She needed an operation and wrote to ask his permission. She was worried about the cost, despite all the medical care he’d required, writing the appalling line: “What worries me is that I really don’t think I am worth the money.” The letter didn’t reach him in time. Without a reply, she chose the cheapest procedure on offer. She died on the operating table, though not before writing a last-ditch letter that gutters out as the anaesthetic takes hold and evinces pure terror beneath the practised layers of stoicism and determined, dogged wit.
Eileen was ill-served by Orwell’s own biographers, much like the four Mrs Hemingways and the two Mrs Hardys, and doubtless every other woman who has the misfortune of becoming a Great Man’s wife. It’s clear her husband expected inordinate quantities of unpaid labour and declined to pay attention to her physical health. I agree with Funder that Eileen’s treatment in life and afterlife isn’t accidental – that the minimising indifference is part and parcel of the ongoing patriarchal reduction of women to something less than fully human, at best helpmeet and at worst repellent slut or scold.
What I object to is her process of correction. Funder believes Eileen is a woman in a box, a woman who needs rescuing from the bad actors of patriarchy, the malevolent magicians who have effected her disappearance. Her self-appointed task is to piece Eileen back together. Not by assembling a biography, as Sylvia Topp did with Eileen: The Making of George Orwell in 2020, but instead by writing a counterfiction to plug all those enigmatic gaps.
Eileen herself used wit as a shield. Funder strips it away, converting the letters into staged scenes in which Eileen confesses to feelings she chose to disavow and suffers a conventional repertoire of emotions she declined to record. It’s not known for certain whether Eileen had an affair with Orwell’s commander in Spain; Funder imagines the relationship as coercive. It’s not known whether Eileen minded Orwell’s affairs; Funder insists she was humiliated and destroyed by them.
Is it useful to remove a woman’s agency? To deny her capacity to make her own choices, including potentially perverse or damaging ones? Will this help dismantle what Funder describes as “the planetary Ponzi scheme” of patriarchy? For me, the most disturbing moments in Wifedom weren’t how Eileen was treated by Orwell but the sustained attempt to present her as a sobbing victim, to display her broken when she sought so fiercely to present herself as strong.
This isn’t to say that I approve of Orwell’s own behaviour. He was what might once have been called, euphemistically, a pouncer, manipulating women into sex. At least one girlfriend accused him of trying to physically force her, which these days we call attempted rape. I can see why you’d want to lean back into those rooms and hear what the women were thinking. But you can’t replace the mores of wartime bohemian London with contemporary attitudes simply by shunting your cast into the present tense. Most of all, you can’t strip away someone’s defences and call it empowerment. It isn’t.
“Wifedom,” Funder writes, “is a wicked magic trick. I want to expose how it is done and so take its wicked tricking power away.” How many more centuries, I wonder, will we need to expose how we were robbed before we lose faith in exposure as a weapon and conjure patriarchy’s replacement instead?
• Olivia Laing’s latest book, Everybody, is published by Picador.
• Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life by Anna Funder is published by Penguin (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
