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A black hole

The airbrushing of George Orwell’s reputation
by
July 2023, no. 455

Wifedom: Mrs Orwell's invisible life by Anna Funder

Hamish Hamilton, $35 pb, 407 pp

A black hole

The airbrushing of George Orwell’s reputation
by
July 2023, no. 455
Eileen and Richard, 1944 (from the book under review)

Wifedom is both an immovable and an irresistible book, an object and a force. Anna Funder, the author some years back of the bestselling Stasiland (2003), has written another great and important narrative of oppression and covert suppression, in this case of the first Mrs George Orwell, Eileen O’Shaughnessy (1905–45). The oppression and suppression are or were the work of her liberal and emancipatory husband – the nearest thing we have these days to a lay saint – and of his six (male) biographers. While nowhere a nasty book (what the Americans would call ‘mean’), it’s a kind of St George and the six dwarves. What’s strange is the persistence of the old bromides. In a recent Guardian review of D.J. Taylor’s Orwell: The new life (2023) – the biographer’s second go-around – Blake Morrison refers to ‘the practical Orwell’ and ‘the complaisant Eileen’. He wouldn’t have said either thing if he’d been able to read Funder’s new book.

As the title would suggest, Wifedom amplifies effortlessly into the question of what it is that allows clever men, productive men, brilliant men, impractical men, to produce work, if not their invisible, misunderstood, neglected, and then effaced wives. To men, whether husbands or sons, brothers or lovers, old men or New Man, it will be more or less painful reading. To women, it will, I dare say, be shockingly familiar. When I read it – short sentences, plain language, and slashing conclusions – I was reminded that Anna Funder once trained as a lawyer. It has the lawyerly virtues: urgency, mobility, tenacity, consequence.

Wifedom: Mrs Orwell's invisible life

Wifedom: Mrs Orwell's invisible life

by Anna Funder

Hamish Hamilton, $35 pb, 407 pp

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Comment (1)

  • I read the book thinking the same as I thought when looking at Bill Leak’s cartoon making a joke about the negligence of a drunk Indigenous father.
    This says more about the author than their product.
    Posted by John Lawrence
    13 November 2023

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