Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life
From one of Australia’s most celebrated authors comes a work that gives shape to the historically obscure figure of Eileen O’Shaughnessy (1905-45). In this formally ambitious work, Funder resurrects Eileen from Orwell’s shadows.
In Wifedom, Funder braids historical fiction, nonfiction, memoir, and literary criticism as she grapples with the complex but painfully familiar subject of a literary wife who forfeits her own promise and ambition for her husband’s. The posthumous tragedy of Eileen’s brief life is that her selfless trade-off has been largely omitted by biographers. Throughout, Funder critiques six Orwell biographers (all male) for perpetuating a pattern of relegating Eileen to the margins.
Letters that emerged in 2005, between Eileen and her friend Norah Symes Myles, have provided Funder with the historical basis to fictionally reconstruct Eileen. Using these and other sources, she renders a meticulously researched portrait of Eileen as a witty, ambitious, and capable working woman with a psychology degree and an Oxford scholarship. Orwell is immediately enamoured, and Eileen’s life takes a sinister turn as they marry.
From Eileen’s viewpoint, we see a sickly, philandering, self-righteous male writer and husband, antagonised that their matrimony has disrupted his work. We witness his compulsive and sexually predatory behaviour as they move to an isolated cottage so George can write. Eileen’s life is cadenced by thankless tasks—typing up and editing Orwell’s work, running their farm, working to financially support them both, and caring for their adopted son while Orwell—a writer obsessed with the ills of power—behaves like a domestic tyrant.
This self-proclaimed work of ‘counter-fiction’ has two key achievements. On the one hand, Wifedom rescues Eileen from obscurity. And on the other, it challenges the mythology that has congregated around Orwell. However, like the inequitable balance of power in their marriage, Eileen remains a figure somewhat dwarfed by the presence and concern for Orwell’s work in the novel.
