Wifedom, by Anna Funder

Why did this book get published?

The Growlery

For anyone wondering, I made a new section where grumpy reviews like this can live. It’s called The Growlery. Hopefully we won’t have to come here very often…

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I cannot quite fathom why this book was published. Or why the reviews are so tame. It is supposed to tell the story of Eileen O’Shaughnessy, George Orwell’s first wife, and thereby illuminate the modern state of wifedom. But that’s not what Funder achieves. Instead, it’s a medley of suburban memoir, clichéd fictional scenes, and some familiar material about Eileen. Someone else has already written Eileen’s biography, you see, and only three years ago.

The reason for a second life would either be new material or a fresh interpretation. Funder has neither. Instead, she writes about herself reading George Orwell by the swimming pool after ferrying her daughter around, the conscience-pricking note her son wrote which she keeps pinned on the fridge, the fact that her female lawyer friends complain that their husbands don’t do the laundry, and so on.

Harmless, you might think, useful even, to compare this to Eileen’s life. But Funder has written several books and worked for the government. The women she refers to as being in the position of modern wifedom—comparable to Eileen—are professionals with husbands who don’t pull their weight. Comparing this to someone who gave up her career, and ended-up clearing out the overflowing latrine in a remote cottage with few amenities or conveniences (like electricity) while her manipulative husband wrote second-rate novels and ignored her sexually, isn’t very convincing. Especially when you add in the fact that Orwell was a terrible sex pest who tried it on with all of Eileen’s friends.

Funder uses Eileen as an excuse to write a book she otherwise wouldn’t get published. No-one will read a memoir of a middle-class writer going about their day. Nor would you be able to sell the fictional vignettes Funder inserts. But wrap it all up as Mrs Orwell’s invisible life and hey-ho. (Incidentally, the idea that there is something modern about the use of biography to examine wifedom begs the question as to whether Funder has read Froude.)

Thus many problems of scholarship are allowed to slip past. Not only are the invented scenes trite, they make large claims about Orwell that aren’t substantiated. Was the sex perfunctory? Did Eileen react like that when he announced he was going to Spain? Why must I go looking elsewhere to find this out? It often reads more like a BBC period drama than a serious book. So many pages have zero footnotes.

Funder writes that “clearly” Eileen had told the vicar to remove the word “obey” from the wedding vows. Orwell said that other parts of the service were missed out too. I was intrigued—did Eileen ask for these other things to be removed? What were they? I looked for the source. No footnote. Eileen’s previous biographer, Sylvia Topp, makes this same claim, referencing Orwell biographer Gordon Bowker. But Bowker has assumed this is what Eileen did. “Eileen, it seems, had arranged with John Woods to omit at least one of the vows...” He also has no source.

So perhaps Eileen arranged it, perhaps the vicar fumbled, perhaps, perhaps, perhaps. But this trail of speculation has been written up as near-fact. Apparently many suffragettes removed “obey”—if that’s the cause of this speculation, then tell me! Add it as useful context! But don’t just interpose your assumptions like this.

Speculation can be a good thing. Biographers should do more of it. But in a careful, well-referenced way, as in My Autobiography of Carson McCullers, which persuasively argues, against other biographers, that McCullers was a lesbian. Otherwise you’re just doing what Lytton Strachey did: bending the truth to prioritise your prose. This is an unfortunate trend in modern biography, such as in the work of Alexander Masters, who is always more interested in himself than his subject.

The book that started the modern genre of biographers writing themselves into their narratives was Footsteps by Richard Holmes, which I highly recommend to you all. Holmes used this approach to show how difficult it really is to bring your subject back to life. So many biographers now use this approach merely to interpose themselves into the story, rather than to illuminate the gaps in the record. The Life and Times of Hannah Crafts, by Gregg Hecimovich, which I shall be writing about soon, gets this balance right. Unlike Funder, Hecimovich talks about himself in order to show us the challenges of getting reliable information about Crafts.

By contrast, Funder is just as interested in her own writing as she is in Eileen, rather like Orwell was. Eileen has been used in a sorry cause here. Instead of rescuing Eileen from obscurity, Funder is using her to tell her own story.

I found myself unable to finish the book.

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Housekeeping

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On 7th September I’m running a salon about Fire and Ice by Robert Frost.

Eileen O’Shaughnessy