Wifedom by Anna Funder
Anna Funder's Wifedom explores the woman behind George Orwell's life and works, his wife Eileen O’Shaughnessy, offering a lucid interrogation of misogyny and what it means to write ‘truth’
Doublethink, the term coined by George Orwell in his celebrated dystopian novel 1984, means the phenomenon of holding two contradictory beliefs in mind simultaneously and accepting them both. For Anna Funder, writer of Stasiland and now Wifedom, the doublethink is that Orwell is both her idol since her teens – chronicler of the proletariat experience, fighter of fascists, radically self-deprecating – and the man who has completely written his wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy, out of the story.
Held together by a dual narrative – part Funder piecing together Eileen’s life story (calling her by last name feels too formal, for someone who comes to feel like family), part the resulting biographical fiction that Funder writes so vividly – Wifedom contains a single throughline, an investigation into time lost to unpaid labour, a patriarchal certitude.
Funder’s failure to work, to love, to do anything but keep on top of the expectations of her wifedom, is what drives her escape into Orwell. But from this grows the organic discovery of previously undiscovered letters, incomplete biographies and photographs haunted by Eileen; never the subject, always the inconvenient addition that survived the camera’s cutoff. “A blue eye, the corner of a shoulder blade,” asking to be reconfigured.
The revelations here are many. Eileen is but one of the women who upheld Orwell’s literary life. He owes them not just his success, but his survival. Funder’s book finally begins to set the record straight.