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Anna Funder’s Wifedom sets out to reverse the ‘patriarchal magic trick’ that made Eileen disappear from accounts of George Orwell’s life.Credit:Spectrum Books

In 1939,George Orwell (real name Eric Blair) considered the literary merits and moral shortcomings of Charles Dickens. It was irrelevant,he insisted,that Dickens was an abominable shit of a husband. “A writer’s literary personality has little or nothing to do with his private character,” Orwell wrote. Other critics disagreed. The debate persists,and we still read Dickens. We can also read about his wife,Catherine Hogarth,and the writing life she led (and enabled). Our literary worldview is all the richer for it.

Orwell,it turns out,was also an abominable shit of a husband. Anna Funder’s new book,Wifedom,tells the story of his first marriage. Funder comes to the page,like Orwell did with Dickens,from a position of deep admiration (“Orwell’s work is precious to me. I didn’t want to take it,or him,down in any way”).

Eileen Blair,the first wife of George Orwell. She kept the couple solvent while they were in Spain during the Civil War.

But she cannot ignore the wilful silences,both in the story the writer cultivated in his lifetime,and the one his male biographers have so carefully manufactured. When those silences are mapped,Orwell’s wife,Eileen Blair (nee O’Shaughnessy),emerges in silhouette – visible in her invisibility. “The ways the text buckles and strains to avoid her is the way I can see the shape she left,” Funder writes.

Wifedom sets out to reverse the “patriarchal magic trick” that made Eileen disappear. And in doing so,Funder hopes to reverse the trickery in her own life. “If my three children – two teens and a tween – were going to emerge from childhood and see me for what I am,I would have to become visible to myself.”

But Funder does not become visible – at least not to us – she slips inside Eileen. In 2005,a sheaf of letters was discovered from Eileen to her best friend,spanning the period of the Orwells’ marriage (1936-1945,ending with her death at the age of 39). It was a little archival miracle. These letters – wry,scabrous and revealing – form the backbone ofWifedom. Funder embroiders around and through them to conjure the woman behind the pen – a kind of psychological ventriloquism,a “counterfiction”.

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.

Wifedom was six years in the making and there is an awful lot going on. The publishing puffery calls the result “genre-bending”,but this book is more of a collision,a grand clatter of forms:counterfiction,biography,cultural critique,literary travelogue,fan letter,memoir and feminist primer (Welcome to Patriarchy:101). In committing to none of them,Funder does a disservice to most of them.Wifedom lacks the dispassionate rigour of a biography;the self-interrogative courage of a memoir;and the unbounded creativity of fiction.

It feels like a particular heresy to break up Eileen’s letters – to disrupt her cadences and explain her jokes. The effect is counter to Funder’s intentions:a woman interrupted,spoken over and spoken for. And in considering Eileen entirely through the prism of her marriage,Wifedom once again confines her to it. But there is both a need and an appetite for the kind of storyWifedom is (un)telling,and there is a brilliant book nested amid smash and clatter.

Wifedom is a damning catalogue of the ways women are diminished,ignored,trivialised and banished to the footnotes (readers should also seek out Kate Zambreno’s magnificent and under-sungHeroines). The Orwells’ involvement in the Spanish Civil War,for instance,is a masterclass in erasure.

As George is piss-farting around in the hills of Catalonia,playing at being a soldier,Eileen is working in the nerve centre of the resistance. But when George writes it all up inHomage to Catalonia,Eileen is relegated to the role of tender nursemaid and never referred to by name. It is Eileen who keeps the couple solvent. Eileen who brings home tales of censorship from her wartime job at the Ministry of Information. Eileen who first writes a dystopian work calledEnd of the Century,1984. Eileen who sharpens the satire ofAnimal Farm. And Eileen who types up every single word of Orwell’s prose.

It is hard not to be angry,not (only) at Orwell,but at the hero industrial complex that is – still – so determined to turn great writers into moral bastions,and that finds the idea of marital partnership – the ceaseless work of wifedom – so threatening to the mythos of male genius.

“Once I knew who should be in the text but wasn’t,” Funder writes,“the biographies seemed like oddly collaborative projects between biographer and subject,as if they belonged to the same unnamed club.” We all know the name of that club.

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