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.
With the precision of a historian, Funder cobbles together scant details to reconstruct a life. And with the imaginative force of a novelist, she speculates in clearly sign-posted moments on what that life was like ... Considering how little information Funder has to work with, Wifedom is a spectacular achievement of both scholarship and pure feeling
Wonderful, genre-bending ... Funder succeeds in drawing a portrait of O’Shaughnessy...that is vivid and multi-dimensional and ultimately heart-rending.
Ms. Funder is a boundary-breaking, risk-taking writer ... Ms. Funder clearly believes that Eileen’s role in Orwell’s life has been undervalued, her brilliance and valor underestimated ... Funder insists that she still loves Orwell and doesn’t want to use Eileen as a cudgel to beat him with; yet often she can’t seem to resist. Wifedom is most effective when she struggles away from judgment and stretches toward sympathy, as she does in her final pages.
A brilliant, creative hybrid of life writing, feminist polemic and literary criticism, which upends the way we read ... Funder’s narrative is a stylistic mosaic, which draws on skills developed in her previous books ... A dashing addition to a genre of books that bring out of obscurity the women (and occasional man) behind famous writers and artists.
I agree with Funder that Eileen’s treatment in life and afterlife isn’t accidental ... What I object to is her process of correction. Funder believes Eileen is a woman in a box, a woman who needs rescuing from the bad actors of patriarchy ... It’s not known for certain whether Eileen had an affair with Orwell’s commander in Spain; Funder imagines the relationship as coercive. It’s not known whether Eileen minded Orwell’s affairs; Funder insists she was humiliated and destroyed by them. Is it useful to remove a woman’s agency? ... How many more centuries, I wonder, will we need to expose how we were robbed before we lose faith in exposure as a weapon and conjure patriarchy’s replacement instead?
A book that dares to imagine lives beyond social conscription ... Here lies the book’s leap of faith. Are you a purist who believes that biography must never include conjecture much less imagined histories? Or do you think it’s more important to juxtapose a canonical life with the possibility of what could have been? ... Funder may read as indulgent to some, but her claims ask: Has history ignored a collaboration between husband and wife which created some of the boldest political literature of the 20th century?
It’s with a combination of outrage and amusement that Funder observes how Orwell loved to immerse himself in the lives of the downtrodden ... Yet he gave scant thought or attention to the women in whose oppression he colluded.
Rattlingly fierce ... Best described as a delirious stylistic mosaic, mixing biography, travel writing, memoir, political essay and full-blown fiction. Not everyone will feel easy about the passages in which Funder allows herself to imagine what is going on inside Eileen’s head. But one response to this might be that Orwell and his male biographers have been writing their own fictions of omission for decades.
The book is a painstaking work of restoration ... A work of this nature must, by definition, contain much that is purely speculative. The imagined scenes are so closely interwoven with the biographical, and with the author’s first-person reflections, that the real Mrs Orwell still feels somewhat elusive even at the end; you close the book wondering how much of what you just read was true ... She is an accomplished stylist but her prose is most alive in these fictional sections, so much so that at times I found myself wishing she had written a complete novel in this voice.
Funder aims to fill in the gaps of the six major biographies of Orwell published between the 1970s and 2003, all written by men, which gloss over his mistreatment of women and serial infidelity. She finds no evidence of the commonly-held notion that the Orwells had an open marriage.) She meticulously dissects her predecessors’ work to show the various ways O’Shaughnessy is erased or diminished, such as the use of the passive tense to suggest that things just happened, as if by magic ... While reclaiming forgotten histories is important, Wifedom is not the homerun that Stasiland was. Billed as a 'genre-bending masterpiece,' its genres are less bent than muddled. The fictionalised sections, told in the present tense, create frequent tonal shifts. As noble as the book’s aim may be and as infuriating as Orwell’s behavior is, by speculating about O’Shaughnessy’s feelings, Funder ultimately risks the same bias error as the biographers who have effaced her — a fiction by addition rather than omission.
As Eileen fleshes out, Funder becomes a ghost. Wifedom is haunted by questions she does not ask of herself. We are not owed Funder’s intimacy, but it is a strange kind of irony that, having been hidden by history, Eileen becomes a hiding place ... The publishing puffery calls the result "genre-bending", but this book is more of a collision, a grand clatter of forms ... In committing to none of them, Funder does a disservice to most of them.
Funder’s engaging and passionate account of this overlooked woman is her attempt to paint her back into the picture ... It is an act of sisterly resurrection that, almost inevitably, tarnishes Orwell’s gilded reputation ... I’m not sure such insights add much. Indeed, a purely factual biography might arguably have served Eileen best, keeping the focus firmly upon her, without the need to draw links between her time and ours. Well-known for her first book, Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall, Funder has a distinctive, commanding style. At times, however, it can be wearing ... offers an imaginative, gripping and sometimes enraging account of a dysfunctional marriage.
A provocative mix of facts and 'a fiction that tries not to lie,' using her remarkable subject’s vivid letters as prompts for imagined scenes that fill the maddening gaps in Orwell’s autobiographical accounts and those of his biographers ... Laced with personal reflections and charged with a searing critique of the patriarchy and its smothering of women’s lives and legacies, Funder’s gripping and insightful portrait of the hidden Eileen Orwell is incandescent.
The result is an engaging, informative, but flawed book that focuses attention on Eileen O’Shaughnessy—who was married to Orwell from 1936 until her premature death in 1945—but too often speaks on her behalf. Funder insists early in the book that she chose not to write a novel about Eileen because she did not want to 'privilege my voice over hers' but this is frequently what she does ... Funder’s decision to compensate for a lack of Eileen’s own words by reconstructing what she felt is nonetheless a mistake ... There is a great deal to admire in Wifedom. It is well-written and, on its own terms, carefully researched, although it is a shame Funder did not consult the extensive scholarship on Orwell, as his ideas about gender and sexuality have been discussed for decades. It has little new to tell us about Orwell but it is not about him; it is about Eileen.
Funder, who came to this project an even bigger fan than me, has smashed the illusions that biographers have upheld about Orwell ... Funder describes reading about Eileen as a 'revelation,' and the book she wrote will be a revelation for many. She has thrown back the curtain on the patriarchy. Using Eileen’s personal letters to her husband and friends, and the many biographies of Orwell, Funder recreates their marriage in fictionalized scenes that often don’t paint Orwell in the ideal light ... The greatest triumph of Wifedom is not that it has brought these crimes to light; it’s that Funder manages to redeem the man by the end of the book without falling back on the same shoddy patriarchal buttresses that have held him up this whole time. She does it in the same way that flawed heroes in every great story redeem themselves: by showing how they suffered as a result of their crimes. And it is clear that Orwell did suffer after the untimely death of Eileen.
The memoir portions of Wifedom aren’t quite as captivating, but it’s clear why Funder wanted to embed her biographical scholarship within her own experiences. Making visible the extent of Eileen’s influence on Orwell’s life and work matters because the condition of 'wifedom,' understood as daily unpaid care work, continues to be distributed unfairly, falling mainly on women’s shoulders. Yet this undervalued work is as necessary as what Funder does so well in Wifedom: retelling history to be more considerate and accurate.
Potent ... Stylistic flourishes enhance the account, most notably the novelistic interludes interspersing Funder’s narration with first-person passages drawn from O’Shaughnessy’s letters that recreate scenes from her life, such as lying ill in London while the city was bombed during WWII. Full of keen psychological insight and eloquent prose, this shines.
Electrifying ... Daring in both form and content, Funder’s book is a nuanced, sophisticated literary achievement. A sharp, captivating look at a complicated relationship and a resurrection of a vital figure in Orwell’s life.
