Author Anna Funder.James Brickwood
One of the best-performing nonfiction Australian titles last year,Funder’s book about Orwell and his often-forgotten wife Eileen O’Shaughnessy has sold nearly 72,000 print copies in Australia since its release in July,according to Nielsen BookScan,and over 100,000 in Australia and New Zealand including ebooks,according to its publisher Penguin. It was awarded Biography Book of the Year for 2024 at the Australian Book Industry Awards on Thursday.
Speaking ahead of her appearance at the Sydney Writers Festival this month,Funder says feedback from readers suggests she has hit a nerve,particularly with older men,who sent “beautiful,long letters about how[the book has] made them think about their lives and how their relationships have been and how work in[those relationships] has been distributed”.
“And about what they didn’t see,what they’ve benefited from that they didn’t see and how that makes them feel now,” she says. “Just the grace of that recognition,and then the sweetness in writing to me about it has been very moving.”
Funder’s Wifedom explores the invisible work done by women.Supplied
Some reflect on relationships that have broken down,some are in their second marriages,she says,summing up what they write in this sentiment:“I wonder whether there were these things that I didn’t see in that first relationship and your book has made me think about that. And I’m grateful for it,but it’s hard.”
Named one of the Financial Times’ best books of 2023,literary non-fiction,the book has also attracted criticism in some quarters.
The family of Celia Kirwan – one of four women to whom Orwell proposed after Eileen’s death – disputed Funder’s claim that Kirwan slept with Orwell. She and her publisher subsequently agreed to revise that section,“although I probably shouldn’t have”.
“Celia told Sir Bernard Crick,one of Orwell’s biographers,that she and Orwell had been lovers. And then six weeks later,she wrote to him to say,‘I might have given you the impression that we have been lovers. Although that would have been a very interesting experience,and I would have liked to have had it,I didn’t.’ So he went back to his notes where he had written that they were lovers and wrote in handwriting – or his secretary did – that she later denied it,” Funder says.
“I have put in the end note exactly what I’ve just told you. So[Celia] tells the biographer and then she takes it back. I understand the sensitivity,but it was a long time ago,they were single people,there was no coercion.”
Orwell’s first wife,Eileen,who Anna Funder argues was a significant influence on his work. especially Animal Farm.Supplied
InWifedom,Funder points out that many biographers ignored or minimised Eileen’s contribution to Orwell’s work;she argues his writing is strongly influenced by her. It was her idea to writeAnimal Farm as a parable.
Several historical critics observed his writing changed dramatically from 1936,the year they married,but not why. A biography published in 2000 by Sylvia Topp,,makes a similar case.
Funder has come under fire for painting a negative picture of Orwell as a person. The author ofStasiland and Miles Franklin-winnerAll That I Amargues his work suggests something of Orwell’s nature.
“To have a vision as sadistic,paranoid,grim and misogynist as that in1984,which comes as a salutary warning,generation after generation,about dictatorships,that’s coming from deep inside a man who understands those things. Or is those things,” she says.
It’s important to tell the full story,Funder says. “If you have a more accurate,less whitewashed view of his character,his relationship to his work is much more interesting. I don’t think we need to live in a world which gives us writers as fictional versions of themselves ... it’s not interesting,and it’s not real.“
Bringing Eileen O’Shaughnessy to life highlights the fact women are often written out of history. Orwell was brought up by political,intellectual women – his feminist mother and aunt,who were also Fabians,says Funder,but that does not rate a mention in books about the famous author. “So for a writer who grows up to have an underdog sense of himself and to be left wing,that is his enormously important intellectual and political inheritance,” she says. “But it seems to be too difficult for biographers to say that.”
“It’s really important to give women credit for shaping the world that we all live in and for having done it for a long time.”
on May 24.
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