Wifedom: Mrs. Orwell's Invisible Life

Anna Funder shifts to her own point of view, dramatizing the moment in which this writing project first captivated her.

On a summer afternoon at a particularly hectic time in her life, she reads a newly purchased collection of George Orwell’s essays. His defense of individuality and independence in middle adulthood calls Funder’s attention to her own slow loss of individuality under the weight of her career and her domestic responsibilities. She decides to read Orwell’s works and his biographies to recapture her individuality.

As she reads, she happens on an odd passage of Orwell’s from a literary journal in which he uses the third person to express a sense of frustration that wives are voraciously sexual and lead husbands to feel insecure in their virility. Upon attempting to discern the passage’s true meaning, Funder is left unsatisfied by the explanations of critics and biographers alike. Funder knows that Orwell had only one wife who lived with him, and she wonders how that wife felt about their relationship.

As Funder pursues her research, she discusses her new project with her teen daughter. Funder reflects on the #MeToo Movement and its effects on young women like her daughter. She explains to her daughter that her writing project is challenging in part because it requires confronting the moral failings of an artist whom she has always respected. Her daughter suggests that Orwell was interested in bad behavior because he knew at some level that he resembled such people.

Eileen returns from her walk and resumes her letter to Norah. She describes the difficulties with keeping house at the cottage and details Orwell’s recent illnesses. Orwell kisses the back of her neck, asks about the scare quotes around the term “bronchitis,” and invites her to come with him to buy cigarettes.

Funder relates an anecdote about a magician and his assistant. While the magician walks back and forth on stage and makes jokes, the assistant disappears and reappears from a black box on the stage.

Funder discusses Eileen’s invisibility in Orwell’s biographies. She describes biographers’ deliberate choice to ignore Eileen, labeling these instances “fictions of omission” (20). Upon researching the biographers’ sources, however, she begins to see Eileen’s personality take shape. Initially, Funder considers writing a novel in Eileen’s voice, but then she discovers the six letters that Eileen wrote to Norah Symes Myles. She decides that using these letters as inspiration for a novel would threaten to overshadow Eileen’s authentic voice. Instead, Funder decides to write “a fiction of inclusion” (22) that highlights Eileen’s life and exposes the patriarchy causing her invisibility. Funder explains that she creates a fictional landscape that is based on factual context, but she also strives to allow Eileen’s own words to take center stage. Funder ultimately wants to offer a narrative that probes the patriarchal erasure of women without going so far as to “cancel” or demonize George Orwell in the process.

Eileen and Orwell meet in 1935 while Eileen lives with her brother, Laurence, and his wife, Gwen, in Greenwich. Eileen is pursuing a master’s degree in psychology in 1934 when she meets Lydia Jackson. Eileen brings Lydia home with her to meet her family, and the women form a solid friendship. (Funder theorizes that Lydia may have had romantic feelings toward Eileen, which she never articulated.)

Lydia invites Eileen to a party thrown by Rosalind, Orwell’s flat mate. At the end of the party, Orwell accompanies Eileen and Lydia to their bus stop; when he returns, he declares that he wants to marry Eileen. A week later, Rosalind hosts a dinner with just Eileen and Orwell, leaving them alone after the meal. Orwell proposes to Eileen, and although she doesn’t immediately answer, Lydia’s memory is that she might have been considering it.

Funder provides a summary of Orwell’s life before his first meeting with Eileen. He spent part of his childhood in Burma, then moved with his mother to England to pursue his education. Later, he returned to Burma to serve under his father as a police officer. That experience showed him the racism inherent in colonialism. The experience served as the inspiration for his first book, Burmese Days, in which his narrator expresses self-hatred for actions that are inspired by Orwell’s own actions as a police officer.

Orwell relied on women heavily both for romantic and professional support, and he had several failed relationships in early adulthood. One such relationship was with Brenda Salkeld, who inspired him to write The Clergyman’s Daughter. Additionally, two prominent older women helped Orwell establish himself as a writer: his Aunt Nellie, who got him a job working for Richard Rees in his socialist bookshop, and Mabel Friez, who set him up with an agent, paid his rent, and became his occasional lover.

Eileen came from an upper-middle class Anglo-Irish family that provided her with a solid education before she won a scholarship to Oxford. Although she was interested in teaching literature after studying under J.R.R. Tolkien, she failed to take first and never pursued writing or literary academia as a career. She had several jobs before her marriage to Orwell and also ran a secretarial company, where she was known for her generosity. Shortly before meeting Orwell, she entered the master’s program for psychology at University College London.

Eileen is portrayed as an open-minded, sharply intelligent woman who used her incisive wit to see and understand others. She was a champion for victims of oppression and was bitingly critical of tyrannical behavior. Funder states that Eileen “finds her next project” (44) in Orwell, seeing him as someone she could support and enhance.

Eileen tries to finish the letter to Norah, but she decides against describing Orwell’s slights and oddities. She wonders about the bedroom and why Orwell seems unwilling to engage in intimacy in their sex life. She wonders if perhaps he is interested in men or if “he lives in a zone where desire and disgust mingle” (47).

When Orwell told her that he was going to fight in the Spanish Civil War against the fascists, he said it casually and was surprised when she said that she would go with him. Now, she decides to end the letter without adding any of the other details, focusing instead on her affection for Orwell.

The narrative returns to a dramatization of Funder’s own experiences.

Funder hears Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings as she makes dinner. Her son is shocked to see men’s treatment of women. When Funder returns to her writing, she considers the domestic labor of wives and reflects on the fact that many male writers have benefitted from that labor. She envies those men and the support they receive. Funder shows her discomfort in discussing the lack of equality in domestic labor in the modern world. Although she and her husband share many responsibilities and she is happy in her marriage, she is nonetheless keenly aware that the pervasiveness of societal expectations for women cause her and women like her to bear the primary burden of housework and household management.

Funder explores how biographers have erased or ignored the women in Orwell’s life. Although Wifedom has Eileen as its primary focus, Funder describes the other influential women in Orwell’s life and explains that they are also largely omitted from his biographies. She argues that Orwell himself adjusts his biographical narrative in his nonfiction to erase the sacrifices of the women in his life. Orwell and his biographers also ignore a clear case of sexual assault with his girlfriend Jacintha. Orwell recasts a sex worker who robbed him as a man when telling the story, in order to save face; Orwell also claims that Eileen agreed to an open marriage, which Funder finds questionable. Funder argues that the passive voice in Orwell’s nonfiction and his biographies aids the erasure of women.

Orwell and Eileen continue their courtship, and Lydia continues to question the wisdom of the relationship. A few months into the relationship, Orwell moves out of Rosalind’s flat. Orwell’s biographers say only that the move offered him more privacy, but Funder argues that Orwell sought privacy to continue his sexual relationship with his current girlfriend while attempting to seduce a second girlfriend and actively engaging in courtship with Eileen. In 1936, he moves into the cottage that his aunt has been renting outside of London, where he will live with Eileen.

Eileen, her family, and Lydia visit Orwell at his cottage. On a walk after the meal, Lydia describes Eileen taking off at a run for no apparent reason. Later, Eileen tells Lydia that she just had the urge to run. Funder posits that this moment might be explained by the awkwardness of introducing family to a potential husband, or it may have been an attempt to escape Lydia’s obvious disapproval.

Funder equates Eileen’s loss of career in her marriage with her own life, recalling a friend’s love affair with a famous rock star. When the musician forced a kiss on Funder, she told her friend and ended their relationship. Funder wonders if Eileen experienced something like her friend’s sense of “reflected glory” (68) when she married Orwell.

Orwell and Eileen’s wedding is a small service officiated by the O’Shaughnessy family vicar, and only immediate family are invited as guests. Eileen and Orwell walk together to the church, and Orwell carries her through the gate. The vicar leaves out the “to obey” wording from the vows at Eileen’s prompting. After a celebratory lunch, Orwell’s family gives them some of the family silver, and Eileen and Orwell are left alone.

During the first months of their marriage, Orwell is prodigiously productive. He writes a novel, multiple book reviews, two articles, and an essay in just the first six months. This productivity is not because of the idyllic country setting, as is regularly referenced in his biographies, but by Eileen’s domestic labor. While she shops, cleans, cooks, manages visitors, and tends to various crises related to the age and upkeep of the cottage, Orwell absorbs himself in his writing.

Funder observes that although Eileen seemed willing to let go of her own career to support Orwell’s work, Eileen began to see that her personal life would also be subsumed by Orwell’s writing.

Funder confesses that she is neither an expert housekeeper nor the engaged mother she would like to be. She refers to Virginia Woolf’s “Angel” (78) of appropriate womanhood, the specter of which haunts both her and Woolf. Although Woolf rejects the submissive and supportive attitude required of decent women in her time, Funder struggles to entirely banish these expectations for herself because they are tied to the role of motherhood and the solemn duty associated with creating people.

Lydia recalls a visit to the cottage during which Orwell delights in trying to disturb her by stressing the possibility of rats in the ceiling and allowing his alarm clock to wake her when he feeds the hens. Lydia worries for Eileen, but Eileen seems satisfied with her challenges, although she appears pale and thin. Although Eileen has little time to pursue her research, she uses the shop she runs from the cottage to encourage the village children to visit by selling candy more cheaply than any other local shop. In the process, she takes on a boy named Peter, whom she discovers is gifted, and she helps him to earn a scholarship. Eileen avoids Lydia after this visit.

Eileen and Orwell’s daily life together works well in every aspect except sexual intimacy. Eileen goes to Orwell’s friend Mabel Friez to discuss her concerns that “George had ‘too much sex’ before marriage” (84).

Funder observes that Orwell’s biographers dismiss the possibility that he was a misogynist; they cite the prominent influence of the women in his life, who had a considerable effect on both his daily life and his work. However, Orwell says that his experience with his mother, aunt, and sisters gave him a picture of men as beasts who are incapable of providing women with pleasure. Funder suggests that Orwell’s well-known anti-gay bias was likely a rejection of subconscious romantic inclinations toward men.

Lydia hears that Orwell is going to fight in Spain and is indignant that he is leaving Eileen behind to take care of the house, the animals, and his professional obligations.

Funder imagines Eileen alone in the cottage—cold, overworked, and underfed. In Funder’s dramatization, Eileen tries to avoid flooding the cottage with smoke and thinks of her wedding vows. She considers the fact that Orwell was surprised by her desire to remove the word “obey” from the vows, although he did agree to do so. She feels alone and surrounded by darkness.