The story of the marriage behind some of the most famous literary works of the 20th century—and a probing consideration of what it means to be a wife and a writer in the modern world.
Funder does a virtuoso performance on the theme, adding personal memoir, some fictional reconstructions and a glittering sense of purpose ... Throw[s] light on the people Orwell failed to notice or fully understand — including, perhaps, himself.
Funder takes this fascinating material and creates a peculiar hybrid. Wifedom is part biography and part speculative fiction written in the present tense ... Added to the mix in Wifedom are hefty chunks of memoir in which Funder describes her domestic life ... Despite the overwhelming evidence against Orwell that Funder marshals, I found myself feeling that Eileen and George’s marriage must have been a bit more complicated than a straightforward case of patriarchal tyranny ... Reading Wifedom, I felt a bit guilty for how often I thought of Orwell’s brilliant essay 'Politics and the English Language,' in which he rails against the flaws — vagueness, imprecision, awkwardness, a reliance on jargon and cliché — that plague Wifedom. Many passages left me wondering what Funder was trying to say ... [A] well-meaning — if, at times, bombastic — reckoning with the patriarchy.
Almost impossible to characterize Anna Funder's book about Eileen Orwell, known — if she's thought of at all — as 'wife of George Orwell.' But this dazzling, infuriating book argues that she deserves a bigger place in history ... It can't have been easy to write a quasi-biography of someone who was Wited Out of the historical record, but Funder has the receipts, and she shows them.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay[/caption]
