The invisible wife of Orwell

Without question, it has been accepted that ‘Great Men’ achieved greatness out of their own volition. Australian author Anna Funder’s Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction-longlisted book Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life (Viking, 2023) is a pushback against this norm, demonstrating how the much-fabled, Motihari-born writer of Animal Farm (1945), George Orwell, exploited the labour of his first wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy.

Due to the six letters exchanged between Eileen and her best friend, Norah Symes Myles, which were discovered in 2005, Funder was able to present what she calls a ‘counterfiction’ to the fiction well-sold by Orwell, which is largely subscribed to date. The public’s faith in ‘Great Men’ seems unshakeable, but women are challenging such men’s absolute authority. In a conversation with DHoS at the Jaipur Literature Festival, Funder talks about Eileen, Orwell, and exhuming history with rage and joy. Edited excerpts

While Orwell helped deconstruct the headiness of power, he did erase Eileen from the popular discourse. What immunised him, in your opinion?

Power is nothing if it’s not power over someone else, right? Orwell came to India as a 19-year-old policeman. What he saw about the despotism of the empire was crucial to his life’s work. At the same time, the power he had was intoxicating. For example, to have a house boy whom he taught to tickle his feet to wake him up, to put people in prison and interrogate them, to buy cheap sex from poor girls — to be the boss, essentially.

But he also had a life-changing observation, which was that the British empire was a system of racist despotism, with theft as its aim. I believe this led him to build the concept of doublethink in his later book, 1984 (1949). That is, white men could consider themselves ‘decent’ only if they did not believe that Indian people had equal human rights. However, what Orwell understood about race and empire, he never applied to the relationship between men and women. He had too much to gain from having a wife who would serve him. However, this wife was wiser, better informed, and as clever as him, if not more. Some may say that this was 80 years ago. Perhaps it was ‘normal’ back then.

Regarding this, I’ve two things to share. Orwell’s mother and aunt were feminists. They were leftwing; they were suffragettes. As he was brought up in a feminist household, he very well knew that women didn’t like to be confined to gendered roles. But he still took great advantage of his wife in a society that considered her sacrifice for him to be normal, required even. Second, it’s complicated, their marriage. Eileen came from a higher-class family and could have left Orwell at any time. She stayed for complex reasons — in part to see what they would write together.

You couple the rage with which you wrote this book with joy and humour. Was this a conscious act?

That’s such a good question. I don’t think we can live with rage. You know, as Gloria Steinem says, ‘The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off!’ Recognition of injustice is crucial. And it is, of course, enraging. Rage is necessary to recognise injustice because it gives you the energy to confront it. Imagine the ridiculousness of this gendered system that imprisons both men and women, so you’ve to step outside of what you think of as “normal” to understand injustice.

For example, why should it be a woman’s job to be the family CEO, cook, housekeeper, chaperone, mental-health counsellor, and all other things? (In Eileen’s case, she was the breadwinner, too.) She neither gets paid nor gets thanked for this invisible labour she puts in. There’s this study that reveals that the labour of women that sustains families, communities, societies, and nations the world over, if paid for, would cost  10.9 trillion US dollars every year! This is a ‘planetary Ponzi scheme.’

Men get to have more money, power, and leisure time than women. If you believe as I do that women and men should have equal rights, this is a problem to be fixed. I left rage behind a long time ago. It makes me excited to see the truth, both artistically and politically. It was an aesthetic challenge to bring Eileen back to life and a political one to show how her story relates to our lives today anywhere in the world, and I think that this excitement trumps rage every time. And to answer your question, there’s no good writing without humour.

Was writing ‘counterfiction’ a deliberate strategy you employed to signal erasure?

I’ve written a book on a left-wing dictatorship Stasiland (2003) and a right-wing dictatorship (the Nazis in Germany) All That I Am (2011). With this one, I wanted to share how the patriarchal regime imposes its version of truth, which is to say that it reinforces the gendered roles of a woman as a wife, daughter, mother, etc., and fails to realise that one is a human first.