Presumptuous Task?

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Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life, by Anna Funder reviewed

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Attempting to understand the complexities of other people’s marriages and how the relationship tessellates is in many ways an improbable pursuit. We are on the other side of shut doors. Nuances and understandings can only be guessed at, the bargaining and agreements on which each marriage is built are made in low voices.Things said and unsaid built over years create barriers and traps for, say, a future writer who might decide that they need to imagine the wife is up to her elbows in a cesspit while the husband demands a cup of tea.

Anna Funder has set out on, to borrow a phrase from Boswell, the presumptuous task of getting to the essence of a marriage which ended now nearly eighty years ago. That is, Orwell’s marriage to Eileen O’Shaughnessy. So wrote Wifedom. Funder felt, as do many others, that Eileen’s contribution to the development of Orwell as a major literary figure has been neglected. Eileen’s support, ideas and talents can be seen to have helped create and shape Orwell’s work while the woman herself has remained invisible – by biographers, by readers and by Orwell himself.

However, the longer Funder looked, the more she saw a woman not merely undersung, but abused alarmingly, married to a serial adulterer, treated by him as a servant, a secretary and as a nurse, her needs ignored and eventually her life squandered as her husband sat in another room, typing, one year to the next, dominating the good space in bad houses, attempting sex with BBC colleagues, eating Eileen’s rations in the war (the cat’s food, too) and dominating the shape of their marriage to her detriment.

Orwell and his behaviour becomes the subject of the book, not Eileen. Ironically, he takes over, with his maleficence, misogyny and finally his desperate search for a wife, any wife, after Eileen’s early death and he himself had begun to slowly die.

Funder makes factual errors and reaches too far. There are no caveats, and in the process not just the character of Orwell is distorted but that of Eileen as well. She is presented as a woman with no agency who is led unwillingly to rural squalor, deceived into marriage, and drudgery. Orwell slowly becomes a villain, a man with nothing but ill intent. Even on his wedding day:

…Orwell is saying…I can’t believe no one is stopping this. Orwell is getting away with something. He can barely afford to keep himself, and yet he is going to get another person’s labour, for life, for free.

Poor Eileen, if true. But the thoughts presented are conjecture, and such conjecture is diffused across the entire book, inserting real correspondence and known history in amongst the author’s opinion, speculation, assumption and fictional narrative (with attendant spiteful pokes and digs). Any action of Orwell is thought to have had a malicious or selfish motive, where Eileen was merely stoic, angry but compliant.

Funder can write very well (and does) but a reader should not be seduced by good writing to trust the bad narrative. While Eileen rode drab buses around Stockton-on-Tees, to the hospital and her death, Orwell is described (via Hemingway) as amusing himself in wartime Paris. Funder underlines that by naming the chapter just that, “Amusing Himself”. She takes Hemingway’s rather bizarre story at face value. Was Orwell worried about Communists and did he ask Hemingway for a gun? Did Hemingway hand one over and have some of his men “tail” Orwell? Is any of this true? Probably not, we don’t know. But in Wifedom, we are left to assume it is.

I found the frequent disagreements with the unarmed “biographers” a bit tedious. As I did the use of Eileen’s friend Lydia Jackson’s supposed disapproval of Orwell as some sort of vindication for Funder’s point of view. All the while leaving out the context of the time, the type of world the couple inhabited and the difficulties men of Orwell’s class and time had in expressing emotions and feelings in any modern sense.

A saint, or someone who pretends to be, can be toppled as easily as a slaver’s statue. Did Orwell ever claim that for himself? It may be a consequence of the nature of his writing but wasn’t Orwell as prophet conferred upon him posthumously? He spoke about “decency” and his work has huge moral value but he was just a man. With all too human triumphs and failures. This myth of Saint George is unhelpful and allows his obvious failures to become a cudgel with which to beat his work.

This happened with the “list”, a supposed proof that the man wasn’t what he made himself out to be and seized upon by some to dismiss him and the work entirely. It is still being seized upon.

A similar thing may be happening with his approach to sexual politics. He didn’t live to see the second wave of feminism, let alone the third or fourth, so lambasting him for underdeveloped opinions in the area is what C.S Lewis (of all people) described as “chronological snobbery”.

Wifedom is frustrating. Eileen deserves to be explored, and female voices in Orwell studies appears to be growing. For example, A.L Kennedy’s Orwell Lecture on the women in his life is online and is worth seeking out. Also, Sylvia Topp’s 2020 Eileen: The Making of George Orwell deals with the subject in a very different way. I would suggest that book as a counterweight.

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Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life, by Anna Funder (Penguin/Viking 9780241482728)