A new book about Eileen O’Shaughnessy, George Orwell’s first wife, overstates her role in the great author’s works.
A new book about Eileen O’Shaughnessy, George Orwell's first wife, overstates her role in the great author's works.
A ll productive talents are part saint, part bastard.
The saint part is the gift the creatives give us: a song to live by, a book to change the world, an innovation that changes lives.
But the bastard also makes himself felt.
Creative work is hard. In their relentless work, creators, whether in the arts or business, don’t stop. Voracious for information, they take it where they find it. Creators don’t bond. They scavenge. As they labor, creators ignore, sideline, or run over family members, colleagues, or employees.
Of course, there’s a range to the collateral damage, from simple neglect (“late tonight, again”) to outright abuse. And the member of the artist’s entourage who pays the price is not always the same. But as the historian Paul Johnson once told me, “somebody always does.”
Revenge, in the form of boardroom coups, divorce suits, or tell-all memoirs, likewise becomes a given. But there remains the question of where the producer’s achievement fits in the calculus. Does an outsized talent need to be an outsized bastard? Do we forgive outsized marital misbehavior for outsized result, as in the case of Elon Musk?
And is there such a thing as too much revenge? Not these days.
At least not according to Anna Funder, the author of a recent portrait of Eileen O’Shaughnessy, the first wife of that stupendous producer, George Orwell. But Wifedom: Mrs. Orwell’s Invisible Life, is not truly a biography of Eileen — indeed, there is already a fine one, Eileen by Sylvia Topp. Funder opts to try her hand at a now popular genre: the speculative, and often fictionalized, “Shakespeare’s Sister” book that focuses on the women in the shadow around those heedless creatives.
Funder intersperses her report on Eileen with her own autobiographical details, including the time she spends in her own kitchen, and the feminist tutorials she gives her daughter. “It’s hard to know how to think about it, when the world was set up to allow men to treat women badly,” Funder tells her child — and then goes on to allow that universal mistreatment by the patriarchy goes on even in homes like hers, that of a “privileged white woman.”
A conventional biographer, Jeffrey Meyers, notes in a letter to colleagues that Wifedom is in effect an invitation to a “Two Minutes Hate,” the kind featured in 1984. Meyers gets it right. For in this book Funder throws everything but the kitchen sink at Orwell, assailing not only Orwell’s marital behavior but also the very integrity of Orwell’s achievement.
Funder sets up her case by claiming that Orwell’s reputation is that of an earnest advocate of the underdog, “a sympathetic mensch” with “no thought for himself.” This strawman Orwell is far from the pained, bitter Orwell, a “wintry conscience,” that Meyers captures. So far that it would collapse on its own accord.
No matter. Funder hurls away. She starts by itemizing the monstrosities to which Eric Blair — George Orwell was the nom de plume — subjected Eileen in the decade of their marriage. Just days after the perspicacious Oxford grad encountered the tall man stooping by the fireplace at a party in Hampstead, she was reading his first novel, Burmese Days.
Eileen did not necessarily like her suitor, but, as Funder does report — this is a near biography — she recognized his talent. Eileen was also game for adventure. Though her friend Lydia warned her, Eileen accepted Orwell’s proposal, dropped work on a psychology degree, and made Orwell her purpose. She had fallen, or jumped, “into the slipstream of him,” as Funder puts it.
Removing Eileen from the comforts of a late Georgian house in Greenwich (her brother’s) to an unwired cottage without hot water, Orwell certainly tested his bride’s loyalty. The groom also instantly made it clear to Eileen that his work, in that case being the Road to Wigan Pier, came first. As Eileen recalled, “He mustn’t let his work be interrupted and complained bitterly that when we’d been married a week that he’d only two good days of work out of seven.”
The insults mounted from there. To keep house, Eileen had to wage war with “battalions of mice, shoulder to shoulder on the shelves, pushing the china off.” She “got stuck with the most disgusting jobs, cleaning out the whole privy when the cesspool backed up.” It was during that non-honeymoon that Orwell also produced that great indictment of colonialism, Shooting an Elephant — an irony only if you regard Orwell’s home life as domestic tyranny.
Soon enough Orwell headed off to Spain to fight on the republican side. The result would be one of the most useful descriptions of Stalinist betrayals ever written, Homage to Catalonia. What Funder emphasizes however is that Orwell nearly shut Eileen out of the Spain-trip adventure: “There’s nothing there for you to do.”
Before the end of their marriage, Orwell would betray Eileen in more typical fashion: sleeping with her friend Lydia, and, it seems, others. Money would remain short, and when the pair adopted a child, he left much of the child care to her, penning 144 articles and reviews in the year the baby came to them, 1944.
Orwell’s perpetual cough and bloody hemorrhages — the signs of an increasingly serious case of tuberculosis — meant Eileen often found herself forced to play nursemaid. Eileen told a friend that Orwell got a hemorrhage, or “something,” whenever she tried to leave. Funder expresses outrage, but, as Topp suggests, “perhaps she was flattered that Orwell sometimes used his illnesses as a way to keep her home with him.”
Orwell’s greatest sin, in Funder’s telling, came towards war’s end, when it became clear that Eileen herself was ill, and required what both she and Orwell told themselves would be minor surgery.
By then the always-hacking Orwell was ignoring the peril of bronchitis to head off again — this time to the Continent to cover the defeat of the Nazis. Rather than enter physician care for a month before her surgery, as London doctors recommended, the anemic Eileen chose a surgeon in Newcastle who would operate right away. The quick treatment, she wrote, “will save money, a lot of money.”
As it happened, that choice killed her. She bled out on the operating table. And Orwell was not there.
Speaking at the Cheltenham Literature Festival, Funder delivered a short version of her sentence: Orwell was “sadistic, misogynistic, homophobic, sometimes violent”– “and also brilliant.”
At least she gives him that. But she doesn’t, really.
Funder insists that only Eileen made his fable, Animal Farm, possible, by listening to the author each night as he read new chapters from the manuscript. Funder maintains the form of the book, the childish story, “was Eileen’s idea,” inspired by Eileen’s own reading as a child. That may well be true. But Funder goes on to suggest that without Eileen, Orwell would have produced not Animal Farm but a dry tract on totalitarianism. Finally, she concludes that Eileen was “no less gifted than Orwell.”
On both the biography and the brains count, Funder distorts badly. While Orwell neglected Eileen, it is also clear that he loved her, and she, him. After all, he gave her one thing that she did relish: adventure, and a chance to participate in the great conflicts of their day. Eileen did join Orwell in Spain — and, we learn, found her own love interest there.
Both Orwell and Eileen loved their son, Richard, and looked forward to peacetime. The couple was “renewing their marriage round their new child” when Eileen’s death came, as a friend, David Astor, put it. Within months of Eileen’s passing, the publication of Animal Farm gave the widower the financial security the couple had always lacked.
A friend reported that the grieving widower thought it was “especially sad for Eileen because things were getting better, the war ending, Richard adopted and she believed that her health would be all right after the operation.” While Funder describes the burden of Orwell’s bleeds, she does not fully capture the gravity of his illness in the later years of their marriage. When Orwell received the news of his wife’s death, he was in a hospital in Cologne himself. After Eileen, Orwell married again — too quickly. That was the user in him — and also the father, seeking someone to care for his son. Orwell expired just a few years after Eileen.
As for the literature: Eileen’s childhood readings may have influenced Animal Farm, but so did Orwell’s. The day before he turned eight, the boy Eric Blair stole his birthday present, Gulliver’s Travels, read it through, and developed lifelong devotion to the satire, later rating its fascination for him “inexhaustible.”
Certainly the well-read Eileen did supply her scavenger with stories, and certainly she was a strong writer herself. It is to Eileen we owe the best understanding of Orwell’s inconsistencies; as she noted in a letter, he was always struggling with his own self-imposed challenge, “how to be socialist while Tory.”
But the plan to find a new means to convey his convictions was his alone. As he reported in the 1946 essay Why I Write, “What I have most wanted to do through the past ten years is to make political writing into an art.” Funder’s claim that Eileen’s talent matched Orwell’s becomes absurd when one asks what signs we have that Eileen’s animal stories could have featured Orwell-level political analysis. To prove women are as clever as men — and they are — Funder seems to feel the need to prove that Eileen was as clever as Eric. Unnecessary. And in her overreach, Funder actually obscures Eileen’s contribution, very real, and also the truth: that this was, as Orwell himself put it, “a real marriage.”
Once she gets going, Funder is not content to take out Orwell, but also assails his biographers. To Funder, they are “seven men looking at a man” — and ignoring the woman, Eileen. This argument is especially unfair to Michael Shelden, who in his popular Great Courses contribution on Orwell, A Sage for All Seasons, devotes a whole lecture to Eileen.
Funder’s ultimate error is to equate artistic egotism with misogyny. Artistic egotism does not discriminate by gender. Orwell was no worse than the flamboyant Edna St. Vincent Millay, whose spouse, Eugen Boissevain, spent his life alternately cleaning up after and waiting for his dallying, alcoholic genius of a wife. “She did what all good writers do,” another poet, J.D. McClatchy said of Millay in a 2009 documentary. “She behaved badly . . . she hurt people . . . she abandoned people . . . in order to make poems.”
Whether the bastard quotient has to be that great in either gender warrants another column. It is the obscuring of Orwell, whose work is so necessary in today’s politically correct schools and DEI-burdened boardrooms, that is our topic. Establishing wives’ rights is important, but there is no need to take necessary talents hostage. Even the modern book club recalls Orwell, because meetings of some sessions of these clubs do resemble Two-Minute Hates. In Wifedom, Funder has produced just the sort of fare the haters in book clubs relish. How sad to think that in selecting Wifedom, book clubs are precluding any remaining chance they will read 1984, Homage to Catalonia, or Animal Farm.