In 2017, Anna Funder fell down a literary rabbit hole.
An existential crisis, precipitated by a perimenopausal meltdown during a soulless shopping expedition in her local mall, sent the Miles Franklin Literary Award-winning author seeking refuge in a nearby second-hand bookshop.
There on the crowded shelves, she found a first-edition, four-volume series of George Orwell's collected essays, journalism and letters – and once she started reading, she couldn't stop. In Orwell's critique of "the smelly little orthodoxies … contending for our souls" (from his 1940 essay on Charles Dickens) she found a resonance with her own situation, burdened by the mental load of being a wife and mother in a heterosexual marriage in a patriarchal society.
"I was reading Orwell for solace and pleasure — and there is a lot of solace and pleasure to be had in Orwell," Funder tells ABC RN's The Book Show.
She proceeded to read (or re-read) everything the much-lauded author and critic had written, including his famed novella Animal Farm (1945) and the dystopian classic Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949).
Funder then moved on to the six biographies devoted to the writer, published between 1972 and 2003.
Next, she stumbled upon an unexpected treasure: six letters written by Orwell's wife, Eileen, that were discovered in 2005.
In the first letter, written to her friend Norah after her marriage to Orwell in 1936, Eileen apologises for not writing sooner:
"I lost my habit of punctual correspondence during the first few weeks of marriage because we quarrelled so continuously & really bitterly that I thought I'd save time & just write one letter to everyone when the murder or separation had been accomplished."
The feisty tone immediately piqued Funder's interest.
"I thought, who was this woman? She jumps off the page … she's really funny. What were they quarrelling about? Why did she want to kill him, even in jest?" Funder tells ABC RN's The Bookshelf.
In her hunt for answers, she returned to the biographies — but found few traces of Eileen in their pages.
"They said things like: 'Orwell had never been happier, conditions were perfect for him for writing, and at least he had a regular sex life'," says Funder.
Eileen's absence from the official historical record gave Funder pause. "I thought, hang on a second, who is making those conditions that are so perfect for him?"
The answer, of course, was his wife, Eileen. "That's what set me off on this book," says Funder, whose latest book is titled Wifedom: Mrs Orwell's Invisible Life.
Taking aim at the patriarchy
Funder worked as a human rights lawyer for the Australian government in the 90s, before moving to Berlin to pursue a career as a writer.
In 2002 she published her first book, Stasiland, which told the stories of people who lived under the repressive regime in East Germany from the 50s until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Stasiland won the UK's prestigious Samuel Johnson Prize (now named the Baillie Gifford Prize) for non-fiction and became an international bestseller.
In 2011, Funder published her novel All That I Am, exploring the world of anti-fascist activists in Britain and Germany in the 20s and 30s. In 2015 she published a novella, The Girl with the Dogs.
Funder knew she could write a great novel using Eileen's letters as material; but, as she observes in Wifedom, fiction would have the unintended effect of privileging her voice over Eileen's.
"With each of my books … I look at the story, and I think, is it best served by fiction or by non-fiction?" she says.
"A novel wouldn't show the sly ways in which history, in the form of these biographies, has hidden [Eileen]."
Funder instead settled on a hybrid of biography and memoir, interspersed with fictional vignettes featuring fragments of text from Eileen's letters, printed in italics.
In chapters written from her own first-person perspective, Funder, who is married with three children, draws parallels between Eileen's role as a wife and her own, 80 years later. "I wanted to make this book to speak to now," she says.
Funder takes aim at the patriarchy – which she describes in her book as "a fiction in which all the main characters are male and the world is seen from their point of view" – and its reliance on the unpaid, unacknowledged work of women.
She shows how Orwell, much of whose writing was animated by the concepts of decency and social justice, failed to recognise the power imbalance in his marriage.
While her husband wrote, Eileen took on the roles of housekeeper, editor, secretary and nurse (Orwell suffered from tuberculosis), tending animals and unclogging drains in their 17th century cottage.
"He can see that some animals are more equal than others … [but] he can't apply that insight into the relationship between the sexes because he simply has too much to gain by being married to a woman, especially a woman as brilliant as Eileen," says Funder.
Who was Eileen O'Shaughnessy?
Eileen O'Shaughnessy was born in 1905 in northern England to a middle-class family. She married Orwell – born Eric Arthur Blair in 1903 in India – in 1936.
In Wifedom, Funder creates a portrait of Eileen from the "scraps of facts" she uncovers, revealing a charming, funny and "highly intelligent" woman who won a scholarship to Oxford, where she studied Chaucer and Wordsworth, and scrubbed the word 'obey' from her marriage vows. She was a talented writer in her own right who focused instead on her husband's career.
Funder found Eileen in the gaps in the biographies and Orwell's own writing, including Homage to Catalonia (1938), his account of fighting the fascists in the Spanish Civil War.
"You can read that book, as I did twice – once as a teenager and once more recently – and not realise that Eileen was in Spain almost the whole time he was there," Funder says.
The biographies similarly played down Eileen's presence in Spain.
"[They] say things like: 'Eileen, who was not really political, went to Spain because she wanted to be closer to her husband, and she stayed in Barcelona in order to procure for him things he might need at the front, like chocolate, cigars and margarine.' And that's it," Funder says.
Funder "reverse-engineered Homage to Catalonia" to restore Eileen to her place in the narrative. "It was like undoing a cobweb; it was really difficult," she says.
A different Eileen emerged, one who was politically active, working in the Independent Labour Party (ILP) headquarters where she produced propaganda bulletins for her boss, American economist Charles Orr.
Funder says: "She was running all the communication and supply for all the men at the trenches, so she knew everything that was going on at the front," unlike Orwell, who relied on his wife for information while he was away fighting. "He didn't really have a picture of what was going on at all."
In Barcelona, Eileen also served as typist and editor of her husband's work.
"Orwell is writing scraps about the conditions in the trenches … [about] how he's got lice crawling over his testicl*s and he keeps sticking his head up, so bored he was trying to find a bullet to hit him, and he's sending back these notes to Eileen who's typing them into a big manuscript that will become Homage to Catalonia," Funder says.
Eileen's position in the ILP office also made her a political target at a time when Soviet spies were attempting to undermine the anti-fascist cause. She survives a dawn raid on her hotel room by Spanish policemen working for Stalinist operatives, saves Orwell's manuscript, and organises the visas that enable them to escape Spain.
However, Orwell fails to acknowledge his wife's forethought and courage in Homage to Catalonia, and although he refers to "my wife" 37 times he never names Eileen.
"If you don't name someone, you don't have to describe them, they are never a character, and they can't come alive, so they can't be brave, they can't save your life, like she did in Spain; they can't save your manuscript, they can't really exist," Funder says.
Eileen's literary influence appears elsewhere in Orwell's work, including Animal Farm, which they worked on together in the evenings.
Orwell initially wanted to write an essay critical of Stalin, but Eileen, who worked for the Censorship Department of the Ministry of Information during World War II, persuaded him to write a novel instead.
"Animal Farm is an outlier in all of Orwell's works. All his other works have a stand-in Orwell underdog figure … and Animal Farm has a group of characters, including female characters who are really well drawn. It's an ensemble piece; it's funny and witty and whimsical in ways that she absolutely was," Funder tells ABC TV's 7.30.
Eileen died unexpectedly in 1945 during a hysterectomy.
At that time, Orwell hadn't yet started work on Nineteen Eighty-Four (which shares a similar title with a poem Eileen wrote at university called End of the Century, 1984), and Funder believes the book suffers from her absence.
"It's an extremely powerful book; it is also horrific, sad*stic, misogynistic and … 10,000 words too long. She would have made that a much better, less extreme work."
A correction, not a cancellation
Funder is clear that she does not want to cancel Orwell. She writes in Wifedom: "I've always loved Orwell – his self-deprecating humour, his laser vision about how power works, and who it works on."
She doesn't even want to cancel the biographers, whose work she respects.
"I owe them an enormous amount. I admire all of these biographies. They're such huge pieces of work to make a narrative out of original sources," she says.
However, cognisant of the process of selection required to create a narrative from the messy business of someone's life, she came to consider the biographies "fictions of omission" that gloss over Eileen's contribution to her husband's work, as well as his many infidelities.
"They are pretending to be the real story, but they leave out so much in order to create this coherent picture of a decent, underdog, everyman Orwell figure," she says.
Instead, she sought to write "a fiction of inclusion" to correct the record and give Eileen her due.
As she writes in Wifedom: "I wanted to make her live."
Wifedom: Mrs Orwell's Invisible Life is published by Hamish Hamilton (Penguin Australia).
