Eileen – and Orwell’s shifting attitudes on gender issues

Sylvia Topp’s excellent new biography of Eileen O’Shaughnessy, the first wife of George Orwell (Unbound, 2020), is focusing attention on how much influence she may well have had on Orwell’s writings – from their marriage in 1936 until her untimely death aged just 39 in 1945.

Indeed, Orwell’s views were constantly changing and there is substantial evidence (easily missed) that during the 1940s Orwell displayed what some might describe as even ‘feminist’ views – and Eileen’s influence could have been substantial.

Feminist critics unite in condemning Orwell as a misogynist. According to Beatrix Campbell (1984: 131): ‘Part of the problem is that Orwell’s eye never comes to rest on the culture of women, their concerns, their history, their movements. He only holds women to the filter of his own desire – or distaste.’ According to Deirdre Beddoe (1984: 140): ‘Orwell was not only anti-feminist but he was totally blind to the role women were and are forced to play in the order of things.’ And for Daphne Patai, author of the seminal The Orwell Mystique: A Study in Male Ideology (1984), Orwell cultivated ‘a traditional notion of masculinity, complemented by a generalized misogyny’ (ibid: 15). He ‘polarizes human beings according to sex roles and gender identity and legitimizes male displays of dominance and aggression’ (ibid: 17). John Newsinger is also critical of Orwell’s attitudes to women. He writes (2018: 154): ‘He regularly dismissed both “feminists” and “feminism”. He was unfortunately one of those male socialists who were opposed to every oppression, except that of women.’ Even Christopher Hitchens, hardly noted as a feminist, argues (2002: 105): ‘Every one of the female characters [in his novels] is practically devoid of the least trace of intellectual or reflective capacity.’

Yet, Orwell was a complex man with many sides to his personality – and one was distinctly un-misogynistic. As Topp stresses (op cit: xiv), many of the women he was to be associated with (Jacintha Buddicom, Aunt Nellie, Stevie Smith, Inez Holden, Mabel Fierz, Celia Kirwan – not to mention his two wives Eileen O’Shaughnessy and Sonia Brownell) were forceful characters who would hardly have tolerated a misogynist. As a father to Richard Horatio, whom he and Eileen adopted in June 1944, Orwell certainly confounded the expectations of his day, displaying considerable affection for the child, taking him for walks in the pram – and even changing his nappies (though with a cigarette in his mouth) (Crick 1980: 483).

Between 1943 and 1947 Orwell contributed 80 ‘As I Please’ columns to the leftist journal, Tribune, where he became literary editor after two unhappy years at the BBC. The subject matter was vast: writers and writing, critiques of the mainstream press, the war effort, language, personal reminiscence and experiences, media censorship and the promotion of free speech, the BBC, post-war reconstruction, racism/anti-racism/anti-semitism, the love of nature, socialism, the ruling classes, the handling of collaborators and so on. And in a number of columns, Eileen’s influence appears considerable.

On 28 April 1944, Orwell certainly confounds his feminist critics by following up the comments of Basil Henriques, chairman of the East London juvenile court, who has attacked girls of 14 for dressing and talking like those of 18 and 19 and putting ‘filth and muck on their faces’ (Anderson 2006: 132). The polymath Orwell (and probably helped by Eileen) proceeds to offer a potted history of women’s make-up – of all things.

One of the big failures in human history has been the age-long attempt to stop women painting their faces. The philosophers of the Roman empire denounced the frivolity of the modern woman in almost the same terms as she is denounced today. In the fifteenth century, the church denounced the damnable habit of plucking the eyebrows. The English puritans, the Bolsheviks and the Nazis all attempted to discourage cosmetics, without success. In Victorian England, rouge was considered so disgraceful that it was usually sold under some other name, but it continued to be used.

Continuing with gusto on the same theme (with no Google to assist him), Orwell suggests that many styles of dress, from the Elizabethan ruff to the Edwardian hobble skirt have been denounced from the pulpit, without success. ‘In the 1920s, when skirts were at their shortest, the Pope decreed that women improperly dressed were not to be admitted to Catholic churches, but somehow feminine fashions remained unaffected. Hitler’s “ideal woman”, an exceedingly plain specimen in a mackintosh, was exhibited all over Germany and much of the rest of the world, but inspired few imitators’ (ibid). And he ends this section of the column with a rousing defence of the girls: ‘I prophesy that English girls will continue to “put filth and muck on their faces” in spite of Mr Henriques. Even in jail, it is said, the female prisoners redden their lips with the dye from the Post Office mail bags’ (ibid).

In another column, responding to a reader’s letter, he uses a serious critique of women’s papers – such as Lucky Star, the Golden Star and Peg’s Paper (completely ignored by the intellectuals of his day) – to explore the ways in which press proprietors and the ruling class in general promote the notion of the moral superiority of the poor as ‘the deadliest form of escapism’ (Orwell 1998 [1944]: 305). He argues that it is all ‘a sublimation of the class struggle’ and adds, with typical dry irony: ‘The vast majority of the people who will see a film are poor and so it is politic to make the poor man a hero. Film magnates, Press lords and the like amass quite a lot of their wealth by pointing out that wealth is wicked’ (ibid).

Yet, he argues, reality enters these papers through the correspondence columns where you can read harrowing tales of ‘bad legs’ and haemorrhoids ‘written by middle-aged women who give themselves such pseudonyms as “A Sufferer”, “Mother of Nine” and “Always Constipated”: ‘To compare these letters with the love stories that lie cheek by jowl with them is to see how vast a part mere day dreaming plays in modern life’ (ibid).

In 1945, Orwell reviews Virginia Woolf’s seminal feminist text, A Room of One’s Own, ‘a discussion of the handicaps which have prevented women, as compared with men, from producing literature of the first order’. There is no condemnation. Rather, he suggests that ‘almost anyone of the male sex could read it with advantage’ (Newsinger 2018: 134-135). Significantly, John Newsinger identifies ‘some shift in his attitudes’ towards women in his writings in the mid-1940s, becoming ‘more sensitive in his arguments regarding gender issues’. Eileen’s influence was, no doubt, profound.

After Eileen dies suddenly in 1945, Orwell returns to composing his ‘As I Please’ columns for Tribune – and Eileen’s influence seems to persist. On 8 November 1946, for instance, he begins his column: ‘Someone has just sent me a copy of an American fashion magazine which shall be nameless’ (Orwell 1998 [1946]: 471). In fact, it was Vogue containing, amidst its many photographs of glamorous women, a short profile of Orwell – along with a photograph of him. Biographer Michael Shelden comments (1991: 455):

Orwell must have felt a mixture of pride and embarrassment to see his personal life described in the breezy style of the Vogue correspondent: ‘Nowadays, Orwell lives in a top-floor flat in London, with his twenty-odd-months-old son. The stuff around his rooms – a Burmese sword, a Spanish peasant lamp, the Staffordshire figures, show something of his foreign life and his strong English solidity. Educated at Eton, Orwell has since then had the kind of picaresque life that is so superb in English autobiographies.’

Orwell doesn’t throw the magazine into the bin. Instead, he proceeds to deconstruct it in detail, noting : ‘One striking thing when one looks at these pictures is the overbred, exhausted, even decadent style of beauty that now seems to be striven after. Nearly all of these women are immensely elongated.’ On the prose style of the advertisements, he says it’s ‘an extraordinary mixture of sheer lushness with clipped and sometimes very expressive technical jargon’. And, typically, Orwell focuses on what’s missing:

A fairly diligent search through the magazine reveals two discreet allusions to grey hair, but if there is anywhere a direct mention of fatness or middle age I have not found it. Birth and death are not mentioned either: nor is work, except that a few recipes for breakfast dishes as given. The male sex enters directly or indirectly into perhaps one advertisement in twenty and photographs of dogs and kittens appear here and there. On only two pictures out of about three hundred, is a child represented (op cit: 472).

Alex Woloch actually highlights Orwell’s habit – in his ‘As I Please’ columns and other essays – to focus on what we are ‘liable to miss’ (2016: 23). Among these elements, during the 1940s, was Orwell displaying what some might describe as ‘feminist’ views – and Eileen’s influence could have been substantial.

References

Anderson, Paul (2006) Orwell in Tribune, London: Politico’s

Beddoe, Deirdre (1984) Hindrance and help-meets: Woman in the writings of George Orwell, Norris, Christopher (ed.) Inside the Myth: Orwell: Views from the Left, London: Lawrence and Wishart pp 139-154

Campbell, Beatrix (1984) Orwell: Paterfamilias or Big Brother?, Norris, Christopher (ed.) Inside the Myth: Orwell: Views from the Left, London: Lawrence and Wishart pp 128-136

Crick, Bernard (1980) George Orwell: A Life, Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin

Hitchens, Christopher (2002) Orwell’s Victory, London: Allen Lane, The Penguin Press

Newsinger, John (2018) Hope Lies in the Proles: George Orwell and the Left, London: Pluto Press

Orwell, George (1998 [1944]) As I Please, Davison, Peter (ed.) Complete Works of George Orwell, Vol 16: I Have Tried to Tell The Truth, 1943-1944, London: Secker and Warburg pp 251-253; Tribune, 28 July

Orwell, George (1998 [1946]) As I Please, Davison, Peter (ed.) Complete Works of George Orwell, Vol. 17: Smothered Under Journalism, 1946, London: Secker and Warburg pp 471-472; Tribune, 8 November

Patai, Daphne (1984) The Orwell Mystique: A Study in Male Ideology, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press

Shelden, Michael (1991) Orwell: The Authorised Biography, London: William Heinemann

Topp, Sylvia (2020) Eileen: The Making of George Orwell, London: Unbound

Woloch, Alex (2016) Or Orwell: Writing and Democratic Socialism, Massachusetts, London: Harvard University Press

• Richard Lance Keeble is chair of the Orwell Society and Professor of Journalism at the University of Lincoln

Uploaded 6 March 2020