George Orwell's wife

80 replies

ArabeIIaScott · 31/07/2023 12:05

Article by the author of a new book on Orwell's wife, out in August. Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life by Anna Funder.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/jul/30/my-hunt-for-eileen-george-orwell-erased-wife-anna-funder

'No character can come to life without a name. But from a wife, which is a job description, all can be stolen.'

'the methods of omission ... fascinated me. When women can’t be left out, they are doubted, trivialised, or reduced to footnotes in eight-point type. Other times, chronology is manipulated to conceal. But the most insidious way the actions of women are omitted is by using the passive voice.'

'We think we’ve come a long way in 80 years, but statistically, there is an irrefutable, globally intransigent heterosexual norm that pervades across ethnicity, colour and class. Nowhere in the world do women have the same power, freedom, leisure or money as their male partners. Every society is built on the unpaid or underpaid work of women, an estimated $10.9tn (£8.5tn) of it a year. But to pay would be to redistribute wealth and power in a way that might defund and defang patriarchy.'

Looking for Eileen: how George Orwell wrote his wife out of his story

Anna Funder explains how the search for Eileen O’Shaughnessy, a compelling figure strangely absent from Orwell’s writing, illuminated her own life

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/jul/30/my-hunt-for-eileen-george-orwell-erased-wife-anna-funder

OP posts:

Thread gallery

Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g · 31/07/2023 14:13

Thank you, this is fascinating. I will just say in mitigation that after Eileen died many people assumed that Orwell would no longer want their recently adopted baby son Richard, but he did. He brought him up, with the help of a nanny (although of course he died when Richard was still very young). I believe I read this in Anthony Powell's autobiography. They were contemporaries, had been at Eton at around the same time, and became friends (not that close, but on good terms) in adult life as a result of shared literary interests.

NancyDrawed · 31/07/2023 14:05

Thanks for posting this. Having the read the article I'm going to order the book, to add to my ever growing pile of 'unread but looks interesting'

TressiliansStone · 31/07/2023 13:54

Wow. That's quite a read.

It also comes as no surprise.

Or rather, the surprise is that Funder managed to pin down enough surviving information about Eileen for us to know all of these things she did.

I do a great deal of family and microhistory, and all of these techniques of simply writing women out of existence are very, very familiar to me. The passive voice indeed! "It was done. It happened." But by whom was it done? Who made it happen?

I have to say, Scottish records and reporting are significantly better than English in this respect. At least women keep their own names after marriage, so that Margaret McPherson becomes known as Margaret McPherson or Brown. Whereas if she marries and moves to England, she becomes known merely as Mrs William Brown. It's quite common in English records to find a Mrs William Brown whose recorded age is more variable even than usual, and only discover later that this is because she is an entirely different woman from the first Mrs William Brown, and indeed the second Mrs William Brown, and is in fact the third wife of William Brown: her own name still unknown.

Floisme · 31/07/2023 13:32

Oh My Word.

Thank you for posting, ArabeIIaScott

off · 31/07/2023 13:20

Thanks for posting this — I found it fascinating and would've missed it otherwise. Orwell's probably my favourite writer, despite the things I've read about Orwell the person, and I'm ashamed to admit I hadn't given much thought to how his wife's existence has been pretty much elided from almost everything I've read about him. It was an eye-opening demonstration of how insidious this woman-hiding can be.

Unflip

1 2 3 4