Anna Funder’s Wifedom: travesty sold as biography

Eileen O‘Shaughnessy deserves better than this litany of baseless assumption and lazy characterisation

A long time ago - the summer of 2006, to be precise - I was working for a little magazine  headquartered in a garret in Bloomsbury (the dream!), when the poet Jenny Joseph got in touch. She had been shown some previously unpublished letters  written by Eileen O’Shaughnessy, the first wife of George Orwell, to her up-to-that-point unknown friend Norah Myles, and she would like to do a piece about them for New Humanist.

The letters, written to O’Shaughnessy’s friend Norah Myles, were about to make their public debut in Peter Davison’s The Lost Orwell, a curious coda to the Orwell scholar’s Complete Works of George Orwell made up of things that had been uncovered since the “last” volume was put out.

Over ham sandwiches and bitter at the Fitzroy Tavern, Joseph (for the record, not wearing purple) waxed lyrical about the vivacious, urgent and idiosyncratic letters, which, as well as adding to the sum of knowledge about Eileen and Orwell’s relationship, also solved a mystery that had dogged scholars and enthusiasts for years: namely who were the “Norah and Quartus” whom Eileen had suggested in a letter would have brought up the couple’s son Richard “beautifully” should anything befall her and George. (Tragically, that sentiment was expressed in a letter to Orwell written just four days before her unexpected death after surgery.)

While she makes no personal claim in the article she subsequently wrote, in The Lost Orwell, Davison makes it clear that Joseph had brought the letters to him, via her friend Margaret Durant, who had inherited them in Norah Myles’ estate.

These same letters form the basis, or rather the justification, for Anna Funder’s Wifedom, released last year to considerable acclaim and also some notable criticism.

Billed as a “counterfiction” Funder’s book sets out to... reclaim? Rescue? Restore?... Eilieen O’Shaughnessy’s legacy, while also exploring how brilliant women are too often expected to prostrate themselves at the altar of Male Genius (see Bradley Cooper and Carey Mulligan’s breathy biopic Maestro for a recent example of a work that both identifies and falls prey to this phenomenon).

The latter thesis is nigh on unarguable. In all walks of life, clever women are expected to do the work while clever men congratulate themselves on their cleverness. But this in itself is not a startling insight, and it is on the other point - specifically telling the story of Eileen O’Shaughnessy and her life with George Orwell - that the stated thesis of Wifedom creaks troublingly with signs of shoddy craftsmanship and corners cut.

We start with what can only be described as sleight of hand. On a page of its own, sits the paragraph: “In 2005, six letters from George Orwell’s first wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy, to her best friend Norah Symes Myles, were discovered. They cover the period of her marriage to Orwell, from 1936 to 1945. Eileen’s letters appear in this book in italics.”

Fair, you might say. All true. But note the “were discovered” - the absence of attribution. And then we move into the book to the point where Funder declares “And then I found the letters.” She goes on: “Six letters from Eileen to her best friend, Norah Symes Myles, were discovered in 2005, in Norah’s nephew’s effects, after the biographies were all written. The biographers didn’t have the advantage of them. I wondered what they would have done with them if they had. One eminent Orwell scholar has noted they reveal ‘a very affectionate nature’. That’s true, but the reality is much, much, more.”

Now, we begin to see the problem. As outlined above, it is true that the letters came to light at that time. We know this because they were published in 2006 in the Lost Orwell, in which, as I have pointed out, Peter Davison went to great lengths to credit those who had brought them to his attention for publication. The letters were republished in Davison’s George Orwell: A Life In Letters in 2011. But Funder decides to keep this information in the footnotes. Moreover, the “eminent Orwell scholar” she cites is... Davison, describing the correspondence in A Life In Letters.

This is devious prose, designed to exaggerate the role of Anna Funder as a seeker, while undermining the hard, dull scholarly work of Davison - and by implication Orwell scholarship as whole.

But this is the modus operandi of Wifedom: while entirely reliant on the work of biographers and scholars for information, Funder nonetheless consistently implies that she has discovered something new, when in fact she has chosen to interpret things differently. Now interpretation is fun and interesting, but it is not the same thing as research. 

And the way she chooses the information she does have is drearily one track. Orwell is not simply a misogynist, he is a monster. Every exaggeration or joke that Eileen makes is in fact a desperate cry for help. Eileen O’Shaughnessy was fiercely bright and well-educated. But rather than revel in her sharpness, or assume at least some agency in her life, Funder, in attempting to rescue her, in fact damns her as an eternal victim. Funder’s tone throughout is in fact that of someone manifesting a kind of male saviour complex: only Funder understands Eileen, only she can see what she's really saying, only she can save her from her bad choices.

Consider this paragraph: “To write this book I have used another voice for parts of it - Eileen’s - because I lost the one I had. I retrieved Eileen from behind the Cerberus, from under the ignoring, minimising and passive voicing. I retrieved her from under her own self-erasure, her attentive listening. When I found her I could see what such forces - and I, as a co-conspirator - had done to me.”

There’s the obvious element of psychobabble here, and yes, all books are essentially about the author, but is it fair on Eileen to substitute her in for Funder’s issues? 

The wry, energetic Eileen of the letters bears little relation to the fearful, literal miserable Eileen of Funder’s imagination. Partly, this is because Funder either doesn’t have, or has chosen to abandon, any sense of tone. 

In the first letter, Eileen writes that, “Eric always gets something if I’m going away and has notice of the fact, & if he has no notice (when Eric my brother arrives & removes me as he has done twice) he gets something when I’ve gone so that I have to come home again”.  You can read this in several ways. Given the general tone of the letters, it would be fair to say this is a joke born out of some frustration. But Funder instead chooses the most damning interpretation: that Orwell used his chronic illness to keep Eileen from her friends: “The diseased lungs she knew about, of course”  she writes, portentously, “but not how he’d use them. She hadn’t expected that.”

The style slips between imagined vignettes and what feels, at least, like straight biography. But every appearance by Orwell comes with a crash of ominous minor-key chords, lest we be in any doubt of his role in the book.

Shortly before the couple’s wedding, Orwell writes to inform a friend of the impending marriage: “This is as it were in confidence because we are telling as few people as possible till the deed is done, lest our relatives combine against us in some way & prevent it. It is very rash, of course, but we have talked it over & decided I should never be economically justified in marrying so might as well be unjustified now as later. I expect we shall rub along all right - as to money I mean - but it will always be hand to mouth as I don’t see myself ever writing a bestseller.”

For readers of 30s British literature, this tone will be familiar. The combination of resignation, stiff upper lip and irony - even the summoning of interfering Wodehousian relatives, out to thwart one’s plans  - is how the middle class communicated. But instead of choosing the face value interpretation, or thinking about the milieu and age she is writing about, Funder steams in with this. “The truth of what Orwell is saying to his friend is not in his words, but in what he means, which is: I can’t believe no one is stopping this. Orwell is getting away with something. He can barely afford to keep himself, and yet he is going to get another person’s labour, for life, for free.”

Funder, somehow, has access to “the truth” of what Orwell really means. 

After the wedding, Orwell notes in another letter: “We were married yesterday in the correct style but not with the correct marriage service, as the clergyman left out the ‘obey’ clause amongst other things.”

“Clearly,” Funder declares, “Eileen was not having that. But as far as the biographers and posterity are concerned, the vicar left it out unprompted. No one, then or now, can credit Eileen with identifying the ‘obscenity’ of ‘obey’ and deleting it.”

In spite of Funder’s emphatic “clearly”, she herself offers no evidence for her assertion.

Funder is all too happy to fill gaps in her knowledge with baseless speculation. In one letter to Norah, Eileen writes that the “Georges Kopp situation” - referring to Orwell’s POUM commander in Catalonia - “is now more Dellian than ever. He is still in jail but somehow managed to get several letters out to me, one of which George opened and read because I was away.” 

Georges Kopp was, in Eileen’s words, “more than a bit gone” on her, though there was never a relationship as such. Using this context, Funder adds this odd footnote: “No one seems to know what she means by ‘Dellian’. Possibly, it describes a three-cornered love affair they (i.e. Eileen and Norah) knew of at university, or one in which someone called Dell pursued her.”

This is a strange conclusion to reach - if it even is a conclusion. In The Lost Orwell, Davison footnotes the same passage with “Dellian for Delian, related to the island of Delos, a Greek island and home of an oracle who posed obscure and convoluted responses to questions put to it.” In maths, the Delian problem refers to the complex idea of doubling the volume of a cube. Whatever Eileen’s own sourcing of the phrase, she almost certainly isn’t referring to some panting undergraduate called Dell.

Later in the book, as Funder describes Orwell’s search for a wife after Eileen’s death, we find this sentence: “Orwell proposes to Sonia a second time, from his bed, or perhaps on a walk in the woods, if he was well enough.” My own exasperated notes here read “YOU DON’T KNOW! Just say you don’t know!”. But it’s too late.

On the subject of Spain, Funder makes this bizarre admission, shortly after quoting a reference to Eileen’s presence in Barcelona in Homage to Catalonia: “I had read Homage twice and never registered that Eileen was in Spain. No one I have ever asked ever remembers her. How can you read a book and have no memory that a person was not in a place alone, but with their spouse?”

This, one can only say, is Funder’s problem, not Orwell’s, or indeed, that of the biographers who have extensively told the story of Eileen’s work in Spain.

The intrepid Anna sets out to find The Truth about Eileen’s time in the Independent Labour Party’s Barcelona office during the civil war: “That’s when I went to Barcelona,” she declares, while hinting, but not quite confirming, that she’s gone there as part of an Orwell Society guided tour - somewhat less intrepid than the narrative demands.

This demonstrative bravery of Funder’s throws up some ludicrous prose. She notes that Eileen is “anxious to core the apples properly for a pie, because Orwell doesn’t like it when he finds any tiny hard bits left in.” And then: “It is the tiny hard bits like that that I don’t like, though I leave them in.”

Everything about this book is depressingly simplified. It’s widely recorded that Eileen opted to have the operation that led to her death at a hospital in Newcastle rather than in London as the former would be faster and cheaper. Funder treats her death after the operation as practically inevitable, and lays the blame squarely with Orwell. The author’s subsequent frantic courting of young women who might make a suitable wife, mother to the couple’s adopted son Richard, and guardian of Orwell’s literary estate) is presented not as the action of a man stricken by grief and his own looming mortality, but as business-as-usual for a man cast as a serial philanderer. Earlier, Eileen’s suggestion that at one stage she might want to write a children’s book about chickens is used to suggest Orwell took the idea for Animal Farm from her. And then there’s the fact she once wrote a poem called End of the Century: 1984 (It was for a school anniversary. Her Audenish verses are better than any of Orwell’s disastrous efforts).

There is no doubt that Orwell was a flawed human being. But what Funder refuses to countenance is that people can be complicated. Her book sets out to contrast the reputation of high moralism that attaches itself to Orwell in the 21st Century with the monster of real life. But the Orwell of Wifedom is a monster of Funder’s own creation - one stitched together with insinuation and implication in place of new and original research. Funder sets out to present us with revelation after revelation, but each revelation is predicated on the idea that her readers believe George Orwell to be simple to the point of innocence, and for the most part, based on conjecture. No one who’s in any way interested in Orwell believes the man to be a saint - and his problematic attitudes to women are well recorded and discussed.

Even Christopher Hitchens devoted an entire chapter of Orwell’s Victory, his stirring apologia for Orwell, to the author’s issues with women, noting, among other things, that Orwell only ever used the word “feminist” in a sneering manner. When even Christopher Hitchens is calling out your misogyny, you know you’re in trouble.

More sadly, the Eileen O’Shaughnessy supposedly brought into daylight by Funder is a timid, sad and literal-minded creature. And, like her husband, her character, meaning and motivations are entirely directed by Funder’s own prejudices and theses.

But too much of Eileen exists in the world for her to serve as a blank slate for Funder’s ideas. As Jenny Joseph wrote in New Humanist almost two decades ago: “Quite a lot was known and recorded about Eileen from this time, and all who knew her remembered a delightful, witty companion, a loyal and intelligent friend, and a marvellous letter writer.”

Perhaps the last word on the relationship between Eric and Eileen should be left to Eileen herself, who told Norah in the first of the surviving letters:  “They haven’t I think grasped that I am very much like Eric in temperament, which is an asset once one has accepted the fact.”

Listen to Anna Funder’s Little Atoms podcast interview