The Wedding – through Eileen’s Eyes

Sylvia Topp’s excellent, recently published life of Eileen O’Shaughnessy, George Orwell’s first wife (Unbound, 2020), follows in a tradition of studies of the wives and lovers of famous artists who have been largely ignored in the conventional biographies. These include Brenda Maddox’s Nora: A Biography of Nora Joyce (1988), Claire Tomalin’s The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens (1990), Stacy Schiff’s Vera (Mrs Vladimir Nabokov) (1999), Sally Cline’s Zelda Fitzgerald (2003) and Suzanne Fajence Cooper’s The Passionate Lives of Effie Gray, Ruskin and Millais (2010).

The conventional dismissal of these women – which their biographers have sought to counter – appears in Rachel Cooke’s review of Eileen in the Guardian, of 10 March 2020. According to Cooke, the book is a ‘dispiriting read’. She even questions whether Eileen deserves such a lengthy biography at all. Topp argues that Eileen had a significant influence on his writings – far more than his male biographers have so far allowed. But Cooke rejects this idea bluntly. ‘Her arguments are unconvincing. I don’t buy her suggestion that Orwell based Julia in Nineteen Eighty-Four on Eileen (that was surely Sonia). Nor do I believe she was behind what some regard as the major improvement in his work with the publication of Coming Up for Air in 1939. He was getting better anyway, as writers do over time.’

Topp, in fact, provides many original and important insights into Eileen’s personality and psychology which certainly justify the biography – and yet Cooke fails to acknowledge them. As an example, it’s interesting to focus on Eileen’s decision to marry George Orwell. Why would a highly intelligent, lively young woman – an Oxford graduate then studying for an MA in Educational Psychology at University College London – give up her chance of a successful career and devote the rest of her life to a largely unknown writer?

Biographer Sylvia Topp at South Shields Customs House (Shields Gazette)

How do the biographers treat this crucial moment? D. J. Taylor is somewhat bemused. ‘Not very much is known of the circumstances of Orwell’s marriage. … One wonders what Eileen, a bright, spirited woman who had given up her Master’s degree for a life spent selling shillings’ worth of groceries and watching her husband type, expected from her marriage. … Whatever Eileen may have thought of the rushing East Anglian winds and smoking chimneys is beyond recreation’ (2003: 186, 188).

Bernard Crick is light on Eileen’s psychology: ‘They were not to be perfect together, but always a good match. She fought his fights and looked after him as well as he would allow – although she was a woman careless of creature comforts herself’ (1980: 268). And Crick’s wedding account concentrates on the event itself – George vaulting over the churchyard wall, the lunch in the pub afterwards – while no attention is given to exploring the feelings behind Eileen’s momentous decision (ibid: 303).

Gordon Bowker is brief on the subject but typically highly sensitive. ‘… she had chosen to live a life which, in many ways, was far more to her taste than that of a professional psychologist – married to a writer with a fellow-feeling for literature, whom she would have liked to help more than he allowed, but with whom, through her sharp wit and ready sense of humour, soon established a highly relaxed and stimulating rapport. … She could have pursued an independent career but chose to partner a man whose strange brilliance deeply attracted her’ (2003: 190).

Michael Shelden, in the authorised biography, makes no attempt to ponder Eileen’s feelings about the marriage. He does focus on their initial attraction to each other. ‘She could appreciate his dry wit, and she was capable of matching it with her own quips. She was not intimidated by him, and she was not the kind of woman whom he could easily shock with his unconventional remarks’ (1991: 230). But for the actual marriage, Shelden concentrates on the concerns of family members and friends over Eileen’s rash decision ‘to throw away a chance of a good career in order to live in a primitive cottage [the Stores, Wallington], far from any major towns with an “author” who wanted to be a shopkeeper and whose literary earnings were modest and insecure’ (ibid: 266).

Eileen is, intriguingly, completely absent from Robert Colls’s account of the marriage. In the lead-up, she warrants just one passing reference: ‘Though his girlfriend Eileen O’Shaughnessy came from South Shields, a town built on collieries, railways and shipyards, and his friend at The Adelphi Jack Common was another Tynesider, Orwell showed no interest in going there and there is no evidence that he ever did go there except to bury his wife and visit her grave’ (2013: 47). The wedding comes after Colls’s account of Orwell’s trip to the north of England, examining the plight of the poor. He says simply: ‘In the meantime, he got married like any ordinary man should, dug his garden over the autumn, and wrote The Road to Wigan Pier as the Jarrow Marchers made their way to London’ (ibid: 71).

Jeffrey Meyers, like Shelden, briefly attempts to explain Eileen’s attraction to Orwell. ‘… she had a deep affinity with him, a shared idealism, and he brought out the warm, loving, maternal side of her character’ (2000: 122). But on the decision to marry – nothing.

Compare all this with Topp’s treatment. Acknowledging the significance of the decision, she devotes a substantial section to exploring – empathetically – Eileen’s complex feelings on the matter. And she is able to draw on her deep knowledge of Eileen’s life leading up to the Big Event – largely missing in the conventional biographies – on 9 June 1936. Why, then, would Eileen suddenly decide to give up her chances for a career of her own? Topp comments (2020: 117): ‘Eileen had already turned down other possibilities for success. She had also rejected the ideas of marrying a man who could have given her the type of family life and home she had grown up with. She had always known – and this belief was increasingly reinforced in those eight years after she graduated from Oxford – that such traditional goals had no interest for her. Since her teenage years, perhaps influenced by her aunt, she’d been intrigued by missionaries and saints, and the rewarding life choices they had made. Instead of being tempted by comfort and common pleasures, she admitted the values of self-denial, rejection of worldly greed and devotion to moral causes.’

Topp acknowledges that Eileen was ‘not a true feminist’. ‘She shared with Orwell a more traditional understanding of marriage. However, since she had by then spent over ten years making her own life decisions, it was impossible for her to become a complete second fiddle to him. And, at any rate, that wasn’t really what he wanted. They were both social rebels, uninterested in a mundane marriage.’ And she adds, perceptively: ‘Although her choice might be criticised by young women of today, Eileen was acting in a very defiant manner.’ She continues: ‘She could see that Orwell would be a difficult man to live with but life with him promised the thrills and surprises for which many women constantly yearn. And Eileen was old-fashioned enough to want to help her husband succeed instead of being admired for excelling on her own.’

Returning to the women marginalised in the conventional biographies of famous artists, perhaps the one I would link most closely to Eileen is Rosie Jackson’s wonderful life of Frieda Lawrence (Pandora, 1994). Frieda shocks all her friends and family by suddenly, in 1912, leaving her husband, Professor Ernest Weekly, of University College, Nottingham, and three young children and eloping with the relatively unknown novelist and poet D. H. Lawrence. Here is Frieda, the daughter of a German count, Friedrich von Richthofen, running off with the son of a Nottinghamshire miner. What a scandal! The rest of their lives together are to be mainly on the move – between England, Europe, Australia and Mexico. Frieda also comes in for an enormous amount of criticism from the biographers. According to F. R. Leavis, in his highly influential D. H. Lawrence: Novelist (1955), Frieda is the Earth mother, the body, coarse matter, while Lawrence is mind, soul and intelligence. ‘Moreover, she had none of his delicate moral discrimination. Unlike Lawrence, she was all crude instinct and blind passion’ (op cit: 12). Keith Sagar describes her as ‘amoral, disorderly, wasteful, utterly helpless in the house, lying in bed late, lounging about all day with a cigarette dangling from her mouth, expecting service and deference from everyone as her birthright’. Elaine Feinstein’s portrait in Lawrence’s Women (1993) is laden with disdain (ibid: 14). And in his profile of Lawrence, R. P. Draper sees the relationship entirely through the man’s eyes: ‘After her divorce from Professor Weekley in 1914, Frieda married Lawrence. Their life together was far from unruffled, since Lawrence did not believe in the “leprous forbearance which we are taught to practise in our intimate relationships” but in “open antagonism” and the free venting of “real hot rage”. But the marriage proved a lasting one and gave Lawrence a centre of stability which his intensely individualistic nature required’ (Draper 1969: 4).

Why would Frieda suddenly give up everything for a man, like Orwell, condemned by many for his misogyny – famously by Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex (1949) and Kate Millet, in Sexual Politics (1970)? Jackson carefully examines her motivations. ‘After her etiolated and repressed existence with Weekley, Frieda found Lawrence vital and alert. He enabled her to live life more fully and her youthful exuberance returned’ (ibid: 30). At the opening of her memoir, Not I, But the Wind, Frieda writes: ‘I wanted to give Lawrence my silence.’ Jackson comments: ‘It is not that she thinks women cannot or should not speak, rather that the life to which she wanted writing to lead … could not be put fully into language. It was the deeper life, and not critical commentary for against it, that Frieda wanted to find and realize’ (ibid: 62).

She adds: ‘Frieda, far from encouraging or supporting Lawrence’s reactionary views on male supremacy, violently opposed them. If Kate Millet was fighting Lawrence on gender issues in the late 1960s, Frieda was doing so throughout their time together. The difference is that Frieda had no feminist framework in and through which to articulate her struggle, nor did she feel the need for one. She wanted to find her identity and particular form of female integrity within and through a heterosexual relationship: separatism was not part of her agenda’ (ibid: 65).

Sylvia Topp returns to the question of Eileen’s ‘feminism’ while examining one of the final, long letters she wrote to Orwell just before her operation – which was to prove tragically fatal, in March 1945. Topp comments astutely: ‘Throughout this letter it becomes abundantly clear that Eileen cannot be described as a feminist. Although she often revealed her strong will, she had accepted the role of a wife as secondary to the husband, something Orwell needed since he believed his writing was more important than anything or anyone’ (op cit: 399).

In other words, both Eileen Blair and Frieda Lawrence had their very individual ways, to a certain extent constrained by the mores of their times, to assert forcefully their notions of female identity. These two biographies help explain the complex factors behind their decisions to commit to Orwell and Lawrence – which makes reading them so particularly moving.

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References

Bowker, Gordon (2003) George Orwell, London, Little, Brown

Colls, Robert (2013) George Orwell: English Rebel, Oxford: Oxford University Press

Cooke, Rachel (2020) Eileen – review, Guardian, 10 March. Available online at https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/mar/10/eileen-the-making-of-george-orwell-sylvia-topp-review

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

Draper, R. P. (1969) D. H. Lawrence, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul

Jackson, Rosie (1994) Frieda Lawrence, London: Pandora

Meyers, Jeffrey (2003) Orwell: Wintry Conscience of a Generation, New York/London: W. W. Norton & Company

Taylor, D. J. (2003) Orwell: The Life, London: Chatto & Windus

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

Richard Lance Keeble is the out-going chair of The Orwell Society