The first (and only) book I’ve ever violently thrown across a room in disgust is my high school English copy of George Orwell’s 1984. I couldn’t understand how someone could write a book about surveillance and mind control and make it so empty. Sparse. Devoid of colour and emotion. So reductive of women. Painting them as merely an afterthought in the barest brushstrokes available that gave them only one purpose; objects of sexual pleasure for men.
These days, as an author myself and someone who’s paid a lot of money to learn how to think critically about details that seem deceptively simple, I can stretch my view of Orwell’s writing and understand that maybe his style was meant to be a metaphor for the circumstance. That you would write plainly and without colour if the threat of surveillance and mind control over your head constantly. Nothing to see here. No details because we’re not allowed to have them. Move along. But that still feels a bit generous to me. Especially after reading Wifedom – a non-fiction tale by Australian author Anna Funder that uses newly discovered letters from Eileen to her best friend Norah Symes and recreates the Orwells’ marriage through the Spanish Civil War and WWII in London.
I’d been hearing about Wifedom for a year or so since it first hit the shelves and then flew straight off them again, becoming a New York Times bestseller and the kind of book Melinda French Gates recommends to Reese Witherspoon. Most recently, it’s been selected as one of six shortlisted finalists for this years $40,000 Mark and Evette Moran Nib Literary Award, an annual celebration of the very best of Australian research-based literature.
Yes, it was being talked about by people in the industry, by booksellers and agents, literary buffs and critics but I was also hearing it whispered about in my mum’s circle of friends. In airports. On Instagram. All places obsession with George Orwell wasn’t exactly par for the course. So, what was it about this book that had the world so invested?
The missing woman at the heart of it. The one who was making women all over the world (and some self-aware men) suddenly look around and go “oh my gosh that’s me/where my wife has been.” Her name was Eileen O’Shaughnessy. She was Orwell’s first wife and the woman, Funder says when I interview her over Zoom “that made him a writer.”
She doesn’t mean that in an ‘inspired muse sense’ either, as so many male creatives of that time talked about the women in their lives. Objects of inspiration driven by lust, desire and a feeling of grand power. No, Funder means it literally. Where male biographers “couldn’t work out what was inspiring (Orwell) to be so creative and charged or why Animal Farm marked such a tonal shift in his writing style” Funder read between the lines, rescuing Eileen from the footnotes of her husband’s story and allowing her voice and power to take centre stage.
Without Eileen, Orwell wouldn’t have survived. How many famous men can that be said of? Probably an endless list. She looked after his health (he was riddled with tuberculosis), maintained his home, turned a blind eye to endless sexual conquests and edited and typed his work, all the while giving him the space, time and freedom to live in imaginary worlds she couldn’t see. This is the invisible weight of wifedom, borne by millions of women and quite frankly, girls around the world. Their husbands and families may not all be authors with hopes of grandeur and legacy but even the ordinary life requires contracts of invisibility (estimates at the cost of unpaid and domestic care labour exceed $1 trillion) .
After all, that’s how Anna Funder found Eileen in the first place. She was trying to escape being smothered by her own wifedom and motherhood. Made invisible in her own life. As neither a wife nor a mother myself yet, I felt its echoes in other ways. In the war on reproductive rights being waged in the United States. In the silence forcibly endured by the women of Afghanistan. In the chilling knowledge that at least one Australian woman is killed at the hands of a current or former partner every week of the year. There are countless ways to make a woman small, to erase her. It’s what patriarchy was built on and feeds off every day. It’s why I started a media company to attack that very problem and why every day since leaving it, I’ve been making sure it stays a throughline in my work.
After six years of research and tireless edits between Sydney and New York, this “big risk of a book” emerged, the answer to Anna’s search. A risk, not only for the unflinching light it turned on her own marriage and family, something Funder says has “become more transparent and consciously equal” in the wake of the book but also for the threat it posed “to the idea of Orwell as an upstanding and polite fellow.” What would it mean to add shade and contour to a literary legacy?
Well, it’d mean letters from all corners of the globe talking about feeling seen or the realisation that they hadn’t actually been looking. It would mean paintings of Eileen and being told countless other stories of women hidden in genius. Conversations with daughters and sisters, sons, fathers and mothers. Paying attention to the invisible in a way that can feel all consuming at times. It’d mean adding patriarchy to the list of systems you’d broken into behind Stasi’s and Nazi’s but feeling pretty sure you didn’t want to write anything that big again. And finally, it would mean sitting down at your desk in Sydney with the pieces of a new novel swirling inside you and wondering, ‘What on earth do I write next?’
I for one can’t wait to find out.