BOOK REVIEW 

Anna Funder (2024) Wifedom: Mrs. Orwell’s Invisible Life.

Penguin, ISBN 9780143778080

BY SARAH HOWE WITH JOHN-JANUSZ EBEL

A couple of years ago, I travelled to Paris and visited George Orwell’s cheap boarding house above 6 rue de Pot de Fer where he lived in 1928 while working as a dishwasher. I wanted to see where Orwell wrote ‘Down and Out in London and Paris›, a memoir, as the title clearly suggests, one that I regard as Orwell›s first masterpiece. I was taken aback by how modest the room was, unchanged from the 1920s, it must have been the location for the writing of this great work.

I thought later that perhaps I could absorb some of Orwell’s spirit that motivated him to write this luminous roman a clef or what later on became the genre of ‹participatory observation› in sociology with famous studies such as Oscar Lewis› The Children of Sanchez. I entered the house and ascended a dark staircase leading to a tiny apartment with virtually no accoutrements except a small wooden desk sitting in a corner of the living room. The room was spartan, with its cold stone floor, and as I stood there looking around the room, I thought of how fitting this ambience was to the writing of this masterpiece.

Here I was, a kind of future witness to Orwell’s formation as a seminal Left political writer attempting to right the wrongs of the world by exploring and recording the life of the poor, the underclass and the itinerant working class. Orwell in, Why I Write, unsurprisingly comments that the combined experience of a sense of horror in what he observed in relation to the oppression of the Burmese in his five years working in Burma as part of the Indian Imperial Police, led him to develop a natural hatred of illegitimate authority, and motivated him to become a writer, a partisan historian of the present writing other masterpieces, perhaps the greatest being, Homage to Catalonia, a witness account of the Spanish Revolution as a member of the revolutionary Marxist organisation, the POUM.

In this book under review, Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life (Penguin 2022), Anna Funder sets herself the task of exploring the contradictions in Orwell’s Weltanschauung: if the acclaimed novelist, essayist, documentary writer and journalist despised racism and was a partisan of establishing a just and equal society, why did he ‘exploit’ the women in his life, including his own wife? Funder presents almost a Manichaean portrait of Orwell contending that Orwell was ‘skilled at exploiting’ an elite class of intelligent, connected, professional women to both promote his work, particularly his wife, Eileen, to edit his work and maintain all essential tasks to run a household. Funder, in fact, even goes as far as to suggest that Eileen was the architect of many of the central creative concepts and plots for such masterpieces as Animal Farm (1945).

I, like Orwell’s mother Ida (who he was greatly influenced by), a Fabian and a feminist, and as someone who has based much of my life work on following in the footsteps of Geroge Orwell, working in the labour movement representing workers’ interests, felt compelled to interrogate some of the central claims made by Funder in her work. Funder’s Wifedom, in our view, ultimately serves to undermine Orwell’s credibility as one of the most outstanding writers of the Left of his generation, a writer who enabled the voices of the oppressed to come to life, whether writing about the depredations of colonialism, the exploitation and truncated lives under capitalism, and prophetic writings, particularly Ninety-Eighty Four about the possibility of the coming of a totalitarian age.

Funder’s book has faced criticism by a number of reviewers for being loose with biographical facts of Orwell’s life. Funder writes, “sometimes I write a scene based on what happened. Mostly I supply only what a film director would, directing an actor on a set.” In relying fundamentally on fictional techniques, we suggest that Funder interpolates facts with fiction. Funder, in fact, knowingly and intentionally conflates facts with fiction and, as we experienced when reading the book, confuses the reader as to what is fact or fiction.

As we read the novel, one cardinal question kept reoccurring: is this a novel or a historical biography? Funder herself describes the book as a ‘counter-fiction’ and criticises Orwell’s numerous male biographers for minimising the importance of women in Orwell’s life. The narrative strategy that Funder employs in this book is one of a ‘biographical’ postmodern trope wherein confusion between truth and fictional elaborations is given literary legitimacy. This is because, according to post-modernism and postmodern ‘biography’, epistemologically, there is no ‘objective truth’; indeed, relativism is the ‘truth’ and therefore ‘anything goes’ and all literary strategies are legitimate and ‘truthful’. Hence, the interpolation of facts and fiction is a legitimate literary strategy for a postmodern ‘biography’. This poses problems in relation to Orwell on a number of levels particularly because Funder judges Orwell without delving at a deeper level into his social background and its limitations in the construction of the character who becomes ‘Orwell’, and Orwell’s partial transcendence of these social background limitations.

We contend that Funder, in fact, gives vent to unsupported constructions of her own which have questionable truthful historical foundations and that she does not provide enough robust evidentiary verification for her unsupported fictional interpolations and constructions. The foundations of this postmodern ‘biographical’ fiction are solely buttressed by quotations from six letters from Eileen O’Shaughnessy to a friend Nora, released in 2005, which mainly detail complaints from Eileen about having to shoulder much of the housework in their small country Hamstead cottage. Funder claims that these letters were discovered after ‘all the biographies were written’ but does not include any reference, for example, to John Rodden’s recent biography, Becoming George Orwell: Life and Letters, Legend and Legacy (2020), where Rodden tackles the contradictory nature of Orwell’s political views with his treatment of women.

Rodden’s exhaustive biography preceding Funder’s postmodern tract concludes with this apposite summation: “Let it be understood that Eric Blair, aka George Orwell, the man of clay exalted today as ‘St. George’ Orwell——the radiant literary personality apotheosized by acclamation and canonised in curricula——was no saint. The task for us readers in the twenty-first century is neither to prostate ourselves before a canonical ‘St George’ nor to deface his gravesite. Rather, it is to read his often challenging, sometimes half-baked writings closely, distinguish his fine work from his “good bad books” and occasional tripe, and aim to see his life clearly and see it whole. At his best, he himself did exactly that; let his own example as a critic and intellectual inspire us by its virtues and both enlighten and restrain us by its failings.”

Rodden, above all, emphasises that like many other biographers and critics, he considers Orwell to be a great writer, overall a decent man, and reportedly a good and faithful friend. At the same time, he observes that this quixotic, adamantly unsainted man had an anti-Semitic streak, an ambivalence toward homosexuals, and a dislike of feminism. He led a somewhat conflicted personal life, as his numerous infidelities during his marriage to Eileen attest with Rodden concluding: “He was a mortal like all of us, with all of the foibles and flaws of a fallible human being. ‘Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proven innocent,’ wrote Orwell just a year before his death in Reflections on Gandhi. Orwell certainly would have applied that standard first and foremost to himself if the thought (which would have seemed to him bizarre) had ever crossed his mind that he might someday be exalted as an exemplar of virtue”; he would have entered into a plea of nolo contendere if his own personal life had ever come under the inquisitional gaze of the Thought and Behavioural Police. Taking him at his own word, we should accept his plea of ‘guilty’.”

Unlike Eileen, who was from an upper-middle class family and studied at Oxford, George was not independently wealthy. He was unable to study at university due to his family’s lower middle-class status and lack of financial support to pursue university studies, choosing because of straightened financial circumstances to give up his dream of going to an elite University. Orwell was forced through his family’s limited economic means to follow in the tradition of his father by joining the colonial service, spending his formative years working as a policeman enforcing British rule in Burma. Working as a policeman in Burma led to Orwell’s radicalisation where, as a policeman, he witnessed the oppression and brutality of Britain running a colonial empire: “the truth is that it wasn’t right to invade a foreign company and hold a country down by force and I could not go on any longer serving an Imperialism which I had come to regard as a racket…this Oppressive regime left me with a bad conscience. I realised I had to not abandon my true nature, settle down and become a writer amongst the social outcasts, beggars, criminals and prostitutes … and challenge man’s dominion over man” (Burmese Days, 1934).

There is no doubt that Orwell was supported by many women largely because it was women who dominated the elite sections of the literary establishment. Many of these women became aware and recognised Orwell’s talent as a writer, introduced to Orwell through his mother Ida’s connections in the suffragette and Fabian movement. Orwell’s ambitions to become a writer was encouraged in Paris in the 1920s by his mother’s sister Nellie, a suffragette, socialist and actress who helped him financially, and connected him with an agent and publishers, and his major patron Mabel Fierz, whom Orwell met after writing Down and Out in London and Paris. Funder argues that most, if not all, Orwell biographers are responsible for underestimating the support and influence of women such as Mabel Fierz and others claiming, for instance, that prominent biographer Bernard Crick characterises Fierz as ‘a wee bit of a crank’. Reading this classic Crick biography, we were at a loss to find such a characterisation. Crick, on the contrary, praises Fierz’s role in Orwell becoming a writer, dedicating pages to her influence and commitment to his writing: “If anyone can claim, besides Richard Rees (who gentle man, never claimed any such thing) to have been his patron, it was Mabel Fierz. Above all, she radiated absolute confidence in what he was writing. She was the only Lady Ottoline Morrell he ever had.”

When describing the relationship between Eileen and Orwell, Funder tells us that Eileen was a socialist, and advocated for the interests of unmarried women and the poor residing in Southeast London, many of whom she had met through her brother’s medical practice. Indeed, there is plenty of evidence in most biographies of Orwell to suggest that Eillen knowingly entered into a marriage with Orwell as an equal partner and indeed as a comrade. Eillen was a political left activist in her own right working at the Workers Educational Association. Eileen was also involved in industrial activity and she entered into the marriage with Orwell knowing who he was as a person and committed to working as a ‘political’ team, together embracing the ‘writers’ life’ — as unglamorous as that often presents. There was a mutual acceptance that this would not be a glamorous life, given Orwell’s limited financial means. In leaving her studies to marry George Orwell, Eileen said “I am very much like George in temperament, which is an asset once one has accepted the fact.” Thus, while it may be true that a division of labour existed between them, we argue this was probably agreed upon such a division was not unusual among many artistic and writer couples of the time, as the Nadia Wheatley biography The Life and Myth of Charmian Clift attests to in relation to the same dynamic occurring between the writers Charmian and George Johnston.

Reading Wifedom led both of us to some disappointments. The first was a feeling that Funder wrote a didactic tract, a polemic, one heavily influenced by her liberal feminist perspectives. As one progresses through the book, the feeling that is uppermost in one’s mind is that one is reading a kind of template postmodern tract formed by a priori prejudices and opinions. Hence this conundrum: Is this a legitimate literary strategy, particularly if we ask ourselves the question whether it leads to a greater understanding of Orwell as a writer and prophet?

Funder writing Wifedom in this form of postmodern trope arguably ignores and omits the crucial relevance of historical context and thus presents an absence of critical tolerance and immersion in Orwell’s and Eileen’s zeitgeist and common project. Funder’s lack of such an empathetic immersion leads her to be what is perhaps best described as a hanging judge of Orwell’s oeuvre.

Such a perspective excludes what is probably most important in assessing Orwell’s calibre as a writer and Orwell’s stature as a witness of his time: what made Orwell different and unique from the cohort of English male writers during the nineteen-thirties and forties. No other English male writer from a similar social background wrote anything equivalent to Orwell’s quotidian account of the Spanish Civil War or the description of a future totalitarian society.

True, Eileen was a highly intelligent partner and she undoubtedly contributed to Orwell’s work after their marriage; and yet, Eileen chose not to assert any claims to joint authorship. Possibly, and highly likely, Eileen assumed the role that many other intellectual women chose during the first half of the twentieth century in subsuming their desire for self-realisation to what they regarded as a common writing project. Other similar partnerships come to mind in this context, and other contrasting ones such as the intellectual partnership between Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre.

Funder’s book, we think does not present a sufficiently complex picture of Orwell as a writer, witness and activist, and regrettably therefore doesn’t achieve the task of insufficiently developing the contradictions and ambiguities that Orwell, as a writer’s unique personality and political actor navigating the rapids of the historical and social forces of his time, became. 

National Chair of the Australian Fabians, Dr Sarah Howe has worked for decades in trade unions across Australia, United States and United Kingdom. She has also worked tirelessly for ALP politicians, local governments and communities to address social issues such as high unemployment, child poverty, and public housing. Most recently, she completed a PhD at RMIT University on strategies for industrial policy and regional economic development in the European Union.

Make up your own mind by reading Wifedom, available online here.