Genius writer, cruel husband: why we can never look at George Orwell the same way again

The afterlife of Eric Blair, aka George Orwell, the “wintry conscience” of his century, is almost as remarkable as our obsession with his masterpiece, Nineteen Eighty-Four. Seventy-something years since his premature death in 1950, there have been several major biographies and “Orwellian” denotes an attitude to life, while Orwell himself has matured into a figure of myth whose dystopian vision still reverberates with prophetic urgency. The writer himself, however, eluding closer scrutiny, remains weird, mysterious and aloof, sequestered like a secular saint within the hairshirt of his rhetoric. “Newspeak”, “Doublethink” and “Big Brother” are now inseparable from the English language. Such is the biographical north-face Anna Funder addresses in Wifedom.

The acclaimed author of Stasiland is a 21st-century writer for whom Orwell’s crystal spirit makes him a much-loved mentor. In 2017, at a crossroads of “peak overload”, arranging everything from school uniforms to orthodontic appointments to a relative’s hospital care, Funder re-read his essay “Why I Write”, and felt it speaking to her distress. One passage, in particular, expressed a thrilling self-doubt that resonated like a summons. Writing, he’d observed, creates a private world where “I could get my own back for my failure in everyday life”.

Orwell could save her, Funder decided. She would “look under the motherload of wifedom”, and use him to liberate herself from “the smelly little orthodoxies” of her situation. It was then, as an overburdened wife, that Funder began to analyse the troubling, sad story of the first Mrs Orwell, Eileen O’Shaughnessy, the shadowy figure who signed herself “Pig”. Eileen has long been in the silky shadow of Sonia Brownell, Orwell’s ambitious second wife, who later became Lucien Freud’s lover, attracting disproportionate literary attention. This may now change.

What follows is one of the most startling explorations of life-writing (Eileen’s, Orwell’s and Funder’s) in recent times. With scores of notes, but no index, Wifedom is a genre-bending tour-de-force that resurrects an invisible woman, and relitigates the saintly image of the man she called “Eric”. Funder, who worked on Wifedom during the #MeToo years, deftly recalibrates our appreciation of George Orwell as an English writer of genius who was also a bad husband.

Her quasi-novelistic portrait of the missing wife, putting story to the service of fiction, takes off from Orwell’s 37 allusions to “my wife” in Homage to Catalonia, in which, not once, does he name her. From the premise that “no one can come to life without a name”, she sets out to bring “Eileen” into focus, in a moving, forensic act of biographical reconstruction.

O’Shaughnessy, we discover, was not only an Oxford scholar. As a student, she’d actually published a dystopian poem entitled “End of the Century, 1984”. But for an episode of sexual harassment, she might have become a university teacher, a sophisticated and fastidious intellectual. Denied that advancement as a woman, she drifted into left-wing emigre London, met the moth-eaten figure of the newly pseudonymous “George Orwell” at a party in Hampstead, and then, with shy, equivocal motivation, made him her next project.

The complex role of writers’ partners remains intractable. Funder freely admits that “the unseen work of a great writer’s life fascinates me”, and worries that to think like a writer is “to think like a man”. More troubling still, “wifedom” is not just “a lie I want to expose”. What does it mean, Funder muses, to concede that Orwell’s work was Eileen’s “purpose”? Her answer, with which this raw and painful biography grapples from page to page, is that O’Shaughnessy was forever “in the slipstream of him”.

Funder shows how such “slipstreaming” works. In a brilliant display of literary reverse-engineering, she deconstructs Mr and Mrs Orwell’s Spanish Civil War, described in Homage to Catalonia, and analyses the shocking degree to which he wrote ”my wife” both into, and out of, his story, airbrushing a tale of courage and character in which Eileen was centre-stage among the anti-fascists at the Continental hotel in Barcelona, while her husband, blundering around the front, was an awkward, and unknown, would-be writer, and possibly confused Old Etonian homosexual. (One of Funder’s most arresting suggestions is that being among men was “where he wants to be”.) More polemical, many passages of Wifedom describe the slow transformation of this marriage into Eileen’s subordination to the “famous writer” in which she, in a tormented act of devotion, gave Orwell a double life: one to depart from, another to come back to.

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After Spain, their marriage teeters on the edge of breakdown. Is it an “open relationship”, or should they adopt a baby? Is Eileen’s bleeding to do with her body or her soul? While her peculiar husband chases other women in a danse macabre of seedy machismo, does she any longer care if she’s alive or dead? In the midst of two lives conducted in an atmosphere of “mental cruelty”, later redefined by Orwell as “Doublethink”, there’s a redemptive turning point.

Orwell wanted to write an essay denouncing Stalin’s betrayal of the Russian revolution. Eileen, who thinks this a terrible idea, convinces her husband to write a fairy tale instead, a revelation that brought him the recognition they’d both craved. The genesis of Animal Farm became Eileen’s swansong, a satirical fiction both lighter and sharper than anything Orwell ever wrote. But Eileen’s respite was temporary: you cannot be rescued from the cause of your trouble by the cause of your trouble.

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In March 1945, while her husband was away in Europe reporting the fall of the Third Reich, Eileen checked into a Newcastle hospital for a routine operation, having posted her best friend a shattering letter in which she doubts if she’s “worth the money” of private health care. Again, she expresses the search for meaning in her life through two versions. The surgery was botched, and she dies under the knife, having written her husband one of the most poignant farewells in the canon of English letters. “When it’s over I’ll add a note to this & it can get off quickly,” she writes before the procedure, later adding, “This is a nice room – ground floor so one can see the garden.”

The rest is myth. Orwell retreats into a numb and inarticulate grief, finding the dystopia (originally called “The Last Man in Europe”) in which he can both lose himself in misery, and secure his fame as a writer. After Funder, we will never look at this writer or his work in the same way again. Nor should we. Her own “happy ending” is provisional. Reconciled to “wifedom”, she can rejoice in her daughter’s future. Job done.