Such is wife: a new look at George Orwell’s life, and first wife Eileen Blair
George Orwell’s first wife, Eileen, emerges from Anna Funder’s new book as a vibrant and intelligent partner, strangely overlooked by many of Orwell’s other biographers.
There have been seven biographies to date of George Orwell. All are solid, extensive, thoughtfully-researched works, writes Anna Funder, who has read them carefully. But there is a problem: all of them are written by men.
This has been good for Eric Blair, the man behind the famous pen name. He has been lionised by each. Together they have bolstered claims that Orwell was an urgent political thinker and one of the significant English writers of the 20th century.
It has not been so good for Eileen Blair, Orwell’s first wife – his cook, cleaner, lover, secretary, nurse and the primary supporter of his work from 1936, when they married, to her death in 1945.
Eileen was, simply, the most important figure in Orwell’s life. Her efforts on his behalf were crucial to his development as a writer.
Wifedom is Anna Funder’s response to the vanishing act which Orwell’s biographers have performed on Eileen - the contrary summoning of a departed spirit. But as with acts of necromancy, Wifedom demands a sacrifice in order to work.
The result is welcome and necessary, returning life to a woman who was gifted, vivid, complex and highly intelligent, who gave up her own ambitions in the furtherance of her husband’s. Yet it is also a discomforting book, for George Orwell does not come out of the story well.
Though Funder’s project rises, fundamentally, out of respect and lifelong love for Orwell’s writing and political stances, he cannot help but emerge from these pages a diminished figure. What you learn here may not be unlearned. You will never read Orwell the same way again.
This is, in part, because Funder embeds the Blair marriage in a larger social matrix. For all his vaunted empathy for the poor and downtrodden, George Orwell remained a traditionalist in many regards. Women, for him, were apparently unpaid helpmeets whose time was less valuable than his own. In the first week of the Blair’s marriage, we learn, Orwell complained that he only got two good writing days in.
For Funder, a wife and mother as well as writer, these entrenched patriarchal assumptions are more than a goad to recuperating Eileen’s story. Her book is not just about the Blair’s marriage: it concerns a condition – wifedom – that the author suffers, alongside so many other women, to this day.
Wifedom, then, tacks back and forth from Funder’s situation in the present and Eileen’s during her marriage, chafing at the unsatisfactory continuities between them. But the book shares one further point of difference. Because the Blair’s correspondence has been lost, and because Orwell’s male biographers have downplayed Eileen’s importance to Orwell’s career, Funder is obliged to take a different approach – that of fictionalising aspects of the couple’s life.
In this she is aided by a series of letters, discovered in 2005 and written by Eileen to Norah Myles, an old Oxford College friend. From the real biographical material in this correspondence, Funder stitches together chapters of informed supposition.
From the couple’s early days living in a tiny, dark, centuries-old house in a Hertfordshire village (where the Blairs used the front room to run a shop), to Catalonia and the jarring disenchantments of the Spanish Civil War, to blitz-era London and Eileen’s death by heart attack during an operation, Funder counters the biographical elisions of Orwell’s biographers with novelistic fashioning.
These sections are often moving – we get to see, a little, into Eileen’s interior world; the dry data of historical record is given subjective life – they can’t help weighing the scales for Eileen, since George remains closed to readers, eternally aloof.
Even in the strictly biographical sections, Funder shows a tendency to pick from among Orwell’s biographers the least flattering angles. When Orwell is shot in the neck during the Civil War, for example, Funder has him regaling comrades with his experiences in the brothels of Paris in the moments before the bullet hits.
This detail comes from an interview by Orwell’s biographer Bernard Crick, undertaken in 1979 with Frank Frankford, who was present at events. But Frankford’s memory was four decades old by then and uncorroborated. And while the story was repeated in Gordon Bowker’s 2003 life of Orwell, D.J. Taylor told a different story in his biography (updated 2023). It was similarly absent from Michael Sheldon’s authorised life from 1993 and Jeffrey Meyers’ in 2000.
It’s a small detail, of course. But it fits into a pattern of Orwell as a man prone to sexual predation and misogyny. Accumulation of such details makes Eileen seem even more of a martyr to their marriage, and Orwell even more callous and cold.
None of this detracts from the larger picture, however. Orwell was a great writer and a bad husband, it is clear. Despite this, Eileen erased her own life to ensure Orwell’s reputation.
Yet Funder makes a strong case that George Orwell owed his wife more than a helpmeet’s support. His literary style sharpened on meeting Eileen, she argues. It took on its mature contours due to her shrewd, testing mind. More important, still, she convinces readers that Eileen “was the embodiment of the ‘fundamental decency’ of human beings” which Orwell so treasured and hymned in his work.
Geordie Williamson has been chief literary critic of The Australian since 2008.
Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life