This exclusive interview with writer Anna Funder featured in our Winter 2024 magazine.
Australian writer Anna Funder, author of the bestselling Stasiland, has written an astonishing book that exposes not just the hidden life of George Orwell's wife Eileen, but also the layers of patriarchy at play that have served to hide her.
A fascinating and feminist take on the role of the wife.
We spoke to Anna about the book in November 2024.
Wifedom is electrifying to read in part because of the way you’ve combined a factual account of Eileen’s life with fictional passages that bring her startlingly to life. Was it always clear that you would write the book in this way or did the concept emerge over time and were you ever doubtful about how the fictional aspects of the book might be received?
I researched the book for about a year before I started writing, and it was even longer before I started writing the fictional parts. The first one of them I wrote was the police raid of Eileen’s hotel room in Spain. It was a morning down the south coast of New South Wales, in the bottom of a beautiful house facing the sea. I didn’t mean to start to write fiction, it just happened.
I had sat so long with Eileen, followed her into houses and archives and the streets of London and Barcelona to find her, but she was not alive on my pages. She was the object of research, instead of the living subject.
The only way I could bring Eileen back to life was to imagine myself into her position, in real scenes that we know happened, and often with her own words, in the letters she wrote. Fiction is a more powerful tool to bring someone back to life. This is because in non-fiction you can’t imagine yourself into another person’s head or body, even if you know obvious things, such as that it would be frightening to sit in a bed in your nightie for two hours while six Spanish policemen under Stalinist control rifle through every single item, no matter how personal, or how potentially politically incriminating, in your hotel room.
Once that scene emerged on the page, I knew I could not continue to write a book that was purely non-fiction. Women have been erased, omitted, doubted, and their testimony and accounts and suffering trivialised forever. Male power starts with power over women. I knew just about all there was to know about Eileen - or at least, as much as I needed to truly position the letters, and her life with Orwell, in a bed of fact.
I wanted her to live again in the minds of readers, and the best way I know how to do that is to write fiction. That is what fiction is for. Writing her was a thrill.
I did wonder if readers would be happy to move from the biographical narrative of Eileen and Orwell, through the personal, present-tense narrative and feminist analysis and then the fiction. But life is heart and head, and a book, as it turns out, can be too. It was a huge creative undertaking. And a huge risk. But the material - their lives, the way their lives have been written/erased, and making sense of that in today’s world, so it’s liberating for all of us, as well as bringing her back to life - demanded finding a new form. So many different kinds of truths. I wanted to make it all as smooth, and as powerful as possible. Able to be inhaled.
I have to say that the layout of the book was very important in the end: the fictional passages are clearly signposted with a tilde and set in narrow margins, so the reader knows immediately whether they’re reading fiction or non-fiction. I have no truck with ‘faction’ - it’s important to know what you’re reading.
What might the book have lost or gained if you’d made the choice to write Eileen’s story as a novel?
It would have been much easier to write, and I could have allowed myself to stray much further from the known facts.
For instance, I would have invented the details of the reason she didn’t get a first class degree at Oxford, something that would account for her giving up on her study of English she’d been so passionate about all her life. It seemed like a bigger blow than it would have been had she thought her grade (a high second) was justified. I would have liked to do some dinner party scenes with funny repartee between them, and some interesting guests.
I would also have represented Orwell’s sexual assaults in detail as felt by the women he approached or assaulted, or Eileen’s wondering why it was that he wanted her to know about his infidelity. Or about Orwell’s attraction to boys and men. And Eileen’s illness and suffering...many other things.
But as fiction, even if it had turned out well, the book would not have had the particular kind of power it has. It would not be the intervention in history, biography and patriarchy that Wifedom is. It would have allowed the biographers or some critics, for example, to claim that the novel was ‘not true’ to life.
I wanted part of Wifedom’s power to be in the unassailability of its truths - to show how extraordinary patriarchal entitlement is, then as now. How it works to erase a woman’s contribution while she’s alive, and then afterwards. So, in my example, Eileen, and her immense talent and work was taken for granted as his (something he was entitled to without asking or thanks) not just by Orwell, but by his biographers, suffering similar blindness with the same cause, right up to 2003.
Also, I wanted the book to be liberatory for women now. So, I ended up with a braided narrative form, forty pages of endnotes. And grey hair.
It took you six years to write. It’s clearly been painstaking work and yet it’s effortless to read. How long did it take you to feel you had really got inside Eileen’s mind and was there a moment or a particular piece of information that helped you crack her open?
Really, it was the ‘murder or separation’ letter. She was so funny, but always in a way that did not foreground herself, that told Norah things aslant. This is a kind of self-deprecation much lauded in women, but it is dangerous too. It allows people, often men, to misinterpret what she’s saying as a ‘joke’ with no other, real meaning.
Another example is when one biographer interprets Eileen telling George, at the end of her life when she is very ill, that she does not feel she’s ‘worth the money’ for a better, safer operation, as ‘making light of her circumstances’, or something like that (it’s in my endnotes). I find that chilling.
Eileen was well educated, held down a variety of jobs and had a financially secure and supportive family member in her brother so, unlike some women of her generation, she could have survived and even thrived without a husband. Given that, why do you think she took on the role of ‘wife to great writer’ so completely and why was she was willing to let herself be so totally subsumed by Orwell? Were you ever frustrated by the choices she made?
I think there are a few, intertwined reasons. She wanted to see what could be written - by him, or together (as was the case with Animal Farm). Indeed, it seems to me she was planning on doing some writing of her own if she could manage it on Jura, along with the other huge workload of house, garden, child, Orwell, editing etc she knew she would have there. I think she thought she had the measure of Orwell (she was so intelligent, and so well educated, much more than he) and therefore thought that she could manage him - but things might have got out of hand.
In the end she was psychologically worn down by illness and by Orwell - to the point, for instance, where she didn’t think she was ‘worth the money’ for a better shot at saving her life.
I was not so much frustrated, as sad that her sense of integrity meant she worked so hard for Orwell, and stayed in that situation that was damaging for her. But I think she had hope too - about the work, the life she was making, the sister for Richard.
A psychiatrist or psychoanalyst might say that every sadist needs or creates a masochist. Someone else might call it coercive control. I don’t use those terms, but just put the evidence, and Eileen’s words out there. I think she was amused by him, too sometimes. And ambitious for his writing.
Of course, Eileen has mostly been made invisible by history and there has been some strong pushback from some Orwell enthusiasts who haven’t enjoyed the way you’ve brought her forward. They have access to the same material as you. Why do you think they weren’t able to see Eileen in that source material the way you were? And why do they resist seeing her even now that you’ve pointed her out?
Yes, it is hard for them to see her, even with all the fact available, and now, available all together in Wifedom. My impression is that they are defensive of him – or of the myth of Orwell as a decent, upstanding, uncomplicatedly heterosexual, everyman. That is utterly a fiction. The truth, which they know, is very different. The facts show that Orwell was very different from the image they would like to continue to project and promote. That’s a difficult position to be in, and to defend. It requires trying to omit, silence, or discredit people who tell the truth. It’s ironic because Orwell was interested in telling the truth as a brave and necessary act, and the basis of good writing. And so am I.
In a previous box, we sent our subscribers a copy of Monsters: What Do We Do With Great Art by Bad People? by Claire Dederer and your book raises some of the same questions. Even if we don’t expect our artists to be stain-free, when we learn the darker details of their biographies, it can change how we feel about the work. Has writing this book changed how you feel about Orwell’s work?
It makes more sense of it. In many ways - of his emphasis on ‘decency’ was because he so wanted to be decent, and probably knew he wasn’t (he meant morally upstanding, and also heterosexual).
He was aware of, as Muggeridge said, something inside him that was repugnant and dangerous to him. I think this made him aware of the fact that there is a surface world, and the reality underneath can be very different. This can be a bit paranoid - as we see in 1984 - and that was useful for his work.
All writers are looking for underlying truths, and the ones we find we find because of who we are. So Orwell’s work makes more sense, not less, when we have a full picture, rather than a false, sanitised one, of its creator.
At the very start of the book you talk about finding the entry in Orwell’s private literary notebook in which he talks about “the two great facts about women” and how this prompted you to go back and look for Eileen in the biographies you’d read and also in his own writing. Is it possible that that passage, which was written in the third person, was a note for a fictional character and not Orwell’s own views or about Eileen as such? Does it matter either way?
I suppose it is possible, but it is improbable. He was writing things he thought or felt to be true, but putting them in the third person, as if to protect or distance himself from them. He certainly thought and wrote them.
It is more likely that the Orwell enthusiasts are making excuses for such horrifying misogyny.
Similarly, for instance, they have invented a further myth, saying that Orwell might have left Eileen out of Homage to Catalonia to ‘protect’ her from Stalinists. There is no evidence for this whatsoever, and indeed they provide none. In fact, there is precious little evidence he ever tried to protect her in any way, from anything. He worked her very hard, he did not care for her, and he made her suffer.
Once, when he thought Stalinists might be knocking on his door in the UK years after their return from Spain (paranoia at work), he grabbed a gun, hid behind the door and told Eileen to open it!
These arguments are made without any facts to back them up, which I find rather bold. And also, an example of men expecting to be able to silence a woman. They would like there to be no evidence from a woman (or victim’s) point of view, because that makes Orwell a perpetrator. We see this hugely in patriarchy, everywhere - from the shame that was apportioned to rape victims rather than the (male) criminal, and on and on. It’s an example of that kind of thing.
By revealing Eileen hidden in plain sight, you vividly reveal the workings of the patriarchy. The parts of the book where you reflect on your own life serve as a useful reminder that this invisible labour that women undertake is not an inequality we’ve managed to fix, no matter how privileged we may personally be. How do we make this labour visible and assign it the value it deserves?
Well, by speaking of it. By not saying ‘we organised the dinner party/ Christmas/ school camp/ doctor/ cleaner. . . etc’ but ‘I’. If we make it visible, it can be seen, and if it’s seen, it can be shared. I think a decent man would want that – he’d not want to be a blind freeloader, forever. Fingers crossed.
