'A blazing, genre-bending masterpeice from one of the most inventive writers of our time.
'Looking for wonder and some reprieve from the everyday, Anna Funder slips into the pages of her hero George Orwell. As she watches him create his writing self, she tries to remember her own…
'When she uncovers his forgotten wife, it’s a revelation. Eileen O’Shaughnessy’s literary brilliance shaped Orwell’s work and her practical nous saved his life. But why – and how – was she written out of the story?
'Using newly discovered letters from Eileen to her best friend, Funder recreates the Orwells’ marriage, through the Spanish Civil War and WW II in London. As she rolls up the screen concealing Orwell’s private life she is led to question what it takes to be a writer – and what it is to be a wife.
'Compelling and utterly original, Wifedom speaks to the unsung work of women everywhere today, while offering a breathtakingly intimate view of one of the most important literary marriages of the 20th century. It is a book that speaks to our present moment as much as it illuminates the past.'(Publication summary)
'In this paper, three women writers offer a personal and critical consideration of the utopian ideal of a place to write – Woolf’s pervasive ‘room of one’s own’ (1977) – as both a physical location and a psychological and cultural ‘space’. In doing so, we draw on José Esteban Muñoz’s writing on (queer) utopia, particularly his observations about hope and disappointment as critical methodologies through which “a backward glance … enacts a future vision” (p. 4).
'We glance backwards to utopian ideals of a place in which to write and consider how and why such ideal places – solitary, uninterrupted, even beautiful – slip through the writer’s fingers. Again drawing from Muñoz, we consider the tension between hoping for a utopian writing place and disappointment at failing to construct, access, or regularly inhabit them. According to Muñoz, although hope is always eventually disappointed, “disappointment … is not a reason to forsake [hope] as a critical thought process” (p. 10).
'Crucially, then, while we consider the reasons for writerly disappointment with/in writing utopias, we return to hope as a powerful methodology for imagining utopian writing places – enacting future visions – and as a productive and enabling aspect of the writing process.' (Publication abstract)
'Conspicuously missing from male-centric biographies, Eileen O’Shaughnessy is the true Orwellian hero.'
'In the summer of 2017, Anna Funder found herself “at a moment of peak overload”. Juggling the competing demands of getting her children ready for the new school year, grocery shopping, home maintenance and caring for members of her extended family, Funder felt she had been spiritually drained by the monotonous demands of motherhood.'
'Wifedom is both an immovable and an irresistible book, an object and a force. Anna Funder, the author some years back of the bestselling Stasiland (2003), has written another great and important narrative of oppression and covert suppression, in this case of the first Mrs George Orwell, Eileen O’Shaughnessy (1905–45). The oppression and suppression are or were the work of her liberal and emancipatory husband – the nearest thing we have these days to a lay saint – and of his six (male) biographers. While nowhere a nasty book (what the Americans would call ‘mean’), it’s a kind of St George and the six dwarves. What’s strange is the persistence of the old bromides. In a recent Guardian review of D.J. Taylor’s Orwell: The new life (2023) – the biographer’s second go-around – Blake Morrison refers to ‘the practical Orwell’ and ‘the complaisant Eileen’. He wouldn’t have said either thing if he’d been able to read Funder’s new book.' (Introduction)
'George Orwell’s first wife emerges vividly from Anna Funder’s new book, writes Geordie Williamson 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.' (Introduction)
'In her latest book, Miles Franklin winner Anna Funder rescues George Orwell’s first wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy, from the shadows of incuriosity. By Michael Williams.'
(Introduction)
Anna Funder on Liberating the Wife of Orwell, Eileen O'Shaunessy
Astrid Edwards
(interviewer),
2023
26811815
2023
single work
podcast
interview
