Such is wife: George Orwell’s ‘brilliant’ secret revealed

A new book lifts the lid on the literary giant’s first marriage, his virtually invisible wife and her murderous impulses.

Author Anna Funder has written a book about George Orwell’s first wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy. Picture: John Feder

Anna Funder was reading biographies of her beloved George ­Orwell when she came across letters sent by his first wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy, at the beginning of their nine-year marriage.

“The first one is written six months after the wedding,” says Funder. “She says to her best friend: ‘I’m so sorry, I would have written sooner but we have quarrelled so continuously and so bitterly since the wedding that I thought I’d just write one letter to everyone once the murder or separation had been accomplished’.

“When I read that I was gone for all money. I had to find out what was going on in this marriage, why this brilliant woman – she won a scholarship to Oxford, where she read English under Tolkien – had such murderous impulses, and more than that – how is that she has been so invisible in all the biographies of Orwell? Somehow I thought that if I investigated the mechanisms of this invisibility I’d shed light on my own.”

Six years on, Funder’s book, Wifedom (Penguin Random House), described by the publisher as “a blazing, genre-bending masterpiece”, is complete and due to be published in July.

Funder, whose literary prizes include the Miles Franklin Award, travelled through Catalonia with Richard Blair, the son Orwell and Eileen adopted in 1944.

“We went through the battlefields and trenches where Orwell had fought. And to the Hotel Continental, where Eileen had lived while she worked in a political job in Spain – though you’d never know she was there from reading Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia.

“It was the most extraordinary and wonderful trip.”

George Orwell in 1945.

Orwell's home on Canonbury Square, Islington, London. Orwell lived in a top floor apartment in the building in 1945. Picture: Stuart Clarke

Blair believes his mother has been underestimated; that she was very much involved in Orwell’s writing.

Funder says one of her motives in writing Wifedom was “envy … I would like a wife like that. She was brilliant … funny … very talented, and it’s just interesting to look ­inside a marriage from a long time ago and see in an extreme form how marriages can work or not really work for the people in them”.

Funder went to all the sources biographers used and “picked up all the scraps that they have left out in order to make their portrait of Orwell. I use Eileen’s letters to bring her to life – I know where she was when she wrote them, that he was in the trenches, or in bed with another woman, and she knew it”.

“I was obsessed to get it right. This book, rather horrendously, has 550 footnotes and end notes, which is what you need to do if you’re crazy enough to try to take on patriarchy.”

Orwell and son Richard.

Funder also has been working as an executive producer with See Saw Films on the six-part series of one of her earlier books, Stasiland, in which she will be played by glacial Australian beauty Elizabeth Debicki, “so she’ll go from being an elegant Diana (in Netflix series The Crown) to a slightly feral Anna in the 1990s. I’m pinching myself about that”.

As for her own reading this year, it’s been mostly Orwell, “with great pleasure and joy, gasping with admiration, but it has meant that I have not been able to give myself properly to somebody else’s fiction for a while”. “I find myself with books by my bedside that I might soon be able to start: Nick Cave’s book (Faith, Hope and Carnage) is one I’m hoping to read next year, and Bodies of Light (by Jennifer Down.) But I am keen for more recommendations.”

Anna Funder’s Wifedom is but one of many titles in The Weekend Australian’s Most Anticipated Books of 2023.