Wifedom by Anna Funder, 2023

I started Anna Funder’s Wifedom, her 2023 book about George Orwell’s first wife, Eileen, with a considerable sense of unease. I had read reviews of the book when it came out which raised some concerns about the methodology used and the conclusions reached; the book’s blurb heightened the sense that I was likely to be reading a hit-job on one of my favourite authors. At the same time I wanted to try and keep an open mind – after all I knew that Orwell was hardly a saint, and if the author had something new to say about his life, his relationships and his work, then I wanted to learn.

The first puzzle to unpick was – what kind of book is this? It’s not a biography – it seemed obvious to me that Funder had originally been working on a conventional biography of Eileen, but that her fox had been thoroughly shot by the publication in 2020 of Sylvia Topp’s Eileen – the Making of George Orwell. Wifedom is also not a novel, although at one point Funder claims she considered making it one. It’s not a memoir, but there are several points at which the author discusses her own personal circumstances, her memories, her status as a wife and mother and her dissatisfaction with the sharing of household tasks within her marriage. In fact the book is all of the above, and more. Helpfully Funder uses the term ‘counterfiction’ to describe the text. The internet defines counterfiction as “a story or narrative that challenges dominant views, mainstream beliefs, or official accounts by presenting an alternative, often marginalized, perspective, aiming to disrupt established realities or norms through fictionalized elements”. This concept was key to me understanding what Funder was trying to achieve. The fictionalised elements in Wifedom are Funder’s attempts to ventriloquise her subject, creating diary entries for Eileen as she drafts the letters to Norah Myles that serve as the author’s inspiration for this account.

Initially this approach – essentially ‘making things up’ – only served to exacerbate my unease. But I quickly realised that was the point – the author wants to challenge the reader and the recreated internal monologues, the streams of consciousness that record Eileen’s private thoughts and ideas as she goes about her day and writes her letters are acts of imagination, attempts to construct Eileen and George’s married life in the absence of more direct, first-hand evidence. As long as the reader remembers that – this is just Funder’s best efforts at imagining what Eileen might have thought – then the intention is successfully achieved. A conventional biography would rarely be so bold as to creatively reconstruct a subject’s thoughts and feelings, but Funder is not constrained by such conventionalities. If these exercises help us see the hidden Eileen more clearly, then the job is done.

The question then is whether this is the case – whether the Eileen and George created by the author here is plausible and convincing? There is of course plenty of evidence that tells us about this couple’s married life. Letters, diaries, and a whole catalogue of personal memoirs by the people who knew them. These accounts are fairly unanimous – this was an unconventional but surprisingly happy marriage. Both George and Eileen said as much over and over again and despite various infidelities, suspected and actual, there is no suggestion they ever considered separation – and of course they adopted a baby in 1944, a signal of the strength of their bond.

Funder presents a very different account of their marriage. Her evidence rests heavily on two primary sources – the accounts of Eileen’s friend, Lydia Jackson, who it would be fair to say never looked kindly on Orwell (she once told an interviewer “I was always sorry that Orwell married Eileen”) and the ‘Norah’ letters. These six letters written from Eileen to a university friend, Norah Myles, who so far as I can tell never met Orwell, and whose replies did not survive, were not “newly discovered” as claimed in the paperback edition of the book’s blurb (I recognise that the author almost certainly did not write the blurb, and may not even have approved the text, but they are part of the book nonetheless.) In fact these letters were ‘discovered’ in 2005, almost 20 years before Wifedom was published, and appear in Peter Davison’s supplement to his collected works, The Lost Orwell. As a number of critical reviews have pointed out, Funder notices every time the passive voice is used to erase Eileen’s contribution to Orwell’s work, but uses it here to imply or suggest that the discovery of Eileen’s letters was by herself. At one point she actually uses the phrase “I found the letters” – from the context the reader will be unclear whether this is the original discovery or whether she simply means “I came across…”.

But to return to the question I posed earlier, is Funder’s recreation of Eileen’s life and marriage plausible and convincing? To consider that question let’s look at the first letter to Norah, written during a visit to Orwell’s parent’s home in Southwold, a rather lovely coastal town in Suffolk, six months after the couple married in 1936. In it appears the following now rather famous line:

“I lost my habit of punctual correspondence during the first few weeks of marriage because we quarrelled so continuously and really bitterly that I thought I’d save time and just write one letter to everyone when the murder or separation had been accomplished”. (My emphasis)

Most critics take that comment to be a joke. To me that’s so obvious as to not need stating. It’s a pointed joke, of course, but unquestionably an attempt at humour. In her biography of Eileen, Sylvia Topp calls it ‘banter’. Richard Blair, George and Eileen’s adopted son, thought it was “obviously tongue in cheek”. Funder is not so sure – for her this comment is to be taken seriously, a sign of the immense distress Eileen must have been experiencing, her letter a cry for help. And as a result the version of Eileen Funder imagines regrets her decision to marry, resents the burden of domestic work, and is constantly irritated by George. I think the reader can decide for themself which is the more plausible interpretation.

Funder’s overall thesis, summed up in the book’s subtitle, Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life, is that Eileen’s contribution to Orwell’s life and work has been erased by the patriarchy and in particular by Orwell himself and his cabal of all-male biographers. Her task therefore is to bring Eileen back into the light and if some imaginative reconstruction of what probably happened is required to achieve that result, then so be it.

As an example of this erasure, the “wicked magic trick” by which Eileen has been made to disappear, Funder takes a careful look through Orwell’s memoir of his time in Spain during the Civil War, Homage to Catalonia. She starts with the surprising statement that

“I had read Homage twice and never registered that Eileen was in Spain. No-one I have ever asked remembers her.”

To which the only possible response to this confession is “Really!!??” Given the centrality of Eileen’s role in the key events of Homage (she even visited him at the front, an event captured on camera (see below)) and the multiple references to ‘my wife’ throughout the text, this is surprising. If Orwell was genuinely trying to avoid letting people know that Eileen was in Barcelona for most of the time that he was in Spain, he did a poor job of doing so. Granted, he does not refer to her by name, for reasons that could be as banal as it being conventional not to do so, or the more serious security reasons some suggest, but as Eileen typed the manuscript (and according to Funder, and others, contributed extensive editorial suggestions) it would have been a job of moments to have added or reinserted her name. Later, attempting to explain why she never noticed Eileen was in Spain, Funder claims (with traces of bitterness?) that the word “wife” is a “job description” (181) rather than a way of describing a relationship. Eileen is “in this story only in a way no one will ever see, like scaffolding, or a skeleton, something disappeared or covered over in the end result”. It reflects poorly on Funder as an Orwell scholar and more broadly as a reader that she did not notice (on either reading) the multiple references to Eileen in Homage – the scene when her hotel room is being searched and she hides documents under her bed, avoiding them being found because the Spanish soldiers were being overly polite towards her, is tragically comic, and one of many very memorable scenes from the book.

The phenomenon of women’s erasure from history is undeniable and there is a convincing case to be made that Eileen suffered from just such an experience. She has been a shadowy, lightly-sketched figure in many Orwell biographies. Sylvia Topp’s work was an important start at correcting that failure. But was the erasure of Eileen a mass conspiracy instigated by Orwell and supported by his biographers and the patriarchy? Perhaps Eileen is not a clear example of this phenomenon, or perhaps Funder’s counter-fictional approach is not the best way of revealing Eileen’s role in Orwell’s life and work.

As an aside, I found the author’s use of unnumbered endnotes, referenced only by page number, really frustrating, particularly when they were used for important content such as her thoughts on the Topp biography. An endnote is simply a list of additional notes on the text, mainly sources, listed by page number. When reading Wifedom you cannot tell whether the author has included a source or comment on the text without constantly checking the endnotes, which of course you quickly stop doing. Why she chose this approach I found baffling.

After finishing Wifedom, but before putting pen to paper to record my thoughts, I read some reviews of the book online. Most of the reviews in the broadsheets were broadly positive. The Guardian called it “a brilliant reckoning with George Orwell to change the way you read”. The review on the Orwell Society website asks more serious questions. But then I came across (‘discovered’) Matthew Clayfield’s cleverly titled ‘She Can’t Tell Norah That’ which makes a compelling case that Funder’s methodology and central thesis is flawed. He argues that the ‘recently discovered’ letters to university friend Norah, although relied on by Funder as a springboard for the text’s speculative counterfiction episodes, do not support any of her conclusions. Funder’s explanation for this is that the letters have to be read creatively, looking for the things Eileen wanted to say but could not. In other words, she could not ‘tell Norah that’. The obvious alternative explanation is that she doesn’t tell Norah things in these otherwise frank and revealing letters is because she didn’t believe them or they didn’t happen. I commend this analysis to anyone interested in reading more about the issues with Wifedom. It is so comprehensive that I was tempted to abdicate any attempt to review the book and just leave the link here, but I don’t think in all honesty I can do that. Crucially, this article also contains in postscripts details of emails from the son of Georges Kopp (Orwell’s commander in Spain, a long term friend of the couple, and according to many biographers, Eileen’s lover) and from Richard Blair himself (George and Eileen’s adopted son) expressing serious concerns about the accuracy and intentions of the author (Funder). Richard writes to Clayfield about Funder’s “(deliberate) misplaced understanding of the dynamic between Eileen and George.”

Another finely detailed critical review can be found here.

Why the hostility towards Wifedom from this group of reviewers? I think the answer is simple, and no it is not ‘the patriarchy’! It is that the Orwell Funder presents us is never given the benefit of the doubt. If there is any explanation of his behaviour offered, any interpretation of his work or his actions, it is always the most critical, the most damning. Orwell emerges as a crude monster, an attempted rapist who abuses his wife, constantly and callously betrays her, takes her ideas and contributions to his work without giving her any credit, contributes if not causes her early death, and avoids every responsibility in their marriage. He is totally unrecognisable from the man that emerges from his novels, letters, essays and journalism. At every turn Funder sits in judgment waiting for Orwell to do something horrible or unthinking. Any love or affection in their marriage is ignored. Rather than the complex, flawed man many of us respect and admire, we are left with a travesty which not only diminishes Orwell but also Eileen as well.

Or to quote one final review which again makes the point far more cogently that I ever could:

“Wifedom is more intent on condemnation than comprehension. With no interest in Eileen’s life before Orwell, the book focuses on Eileen solely as an example of “how a woman can be buried first by domesticity and then by history.” Funder enlists her to buttress her assertion that there “is not one place on the planet where women as a group have the same power, freedom, leisure or money as their male partners.” That may well be true, but the uniqueness of Eileen O’Shaughnessy Blair disappears amid the abstraction of “wifedom.” Appropriating her merely as an exhibit in a polemic against patriarchy is the same as erasing her.”

Wifedom by Anna Funder, 2023