George Orwell's wife

[ArabeIIaScott]

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.'

He was married twice. His second wife, Sonia, married him when he was in hospital with TB, three months before his death.

Eileen, his first wife, i.e. the subject of this thread, died at the age of 30 under the anaesthetic while having a hysterectomy. Poor, poor woman.

39, apols.

Painfully accurate.

I must remind myself, yet again, not to read the comments. Although some of them are fine and even interesting - the woman whose Nobel Laureate husband wrote his autobiography and mentioned her only once, went to a friend to get it published who suggested his wife could be his editor. The NL baulked at the idea as he might want her name on the book. It was never published - many of them are from men who think that all Funder wants to do is slag off Orwell. How weak men's gods are that they can be destroyed by recognising the fact that the women in their lives helped them achieve god-like status.

How weak men's gods are that they can be destroyed by recognising the fact that the women in their lives helped them achieve god-like status.

Amen to that, sister.

Middlemarch is quite interesting in this respect. Casaubon grudgingly allows the intellectually-ambitious Dorothea to become his secretary in his vast classical work, but he won't properly involve her in his ideas. Her challenging questions, although well intentioned, bring on an attack of his illness. However the possibility of his imminent death forces him to acknowledge her potential as he asks her to continue his work after he is gone.

Yes, and even more common in Scottish and American naming, so it's a good workaround.

I still get The Rage sometimes...

Tracing women requires such a lot of use of nagative space.

It's like trying to see silhouettes and shadows, or the out-of-focus obstruction ruining the front corner of a photograph.

@walkingawayfromhome your book looks fascinating. And I love your username...

@MouseMinge
I’m not sure if you’d enjoy/appreciate the ThanksForTyping/ThankYouForTyping Twitter discourse*; but I think you’ll probably like this article about the work of Ethel Kate Dickens (yes, relation; specifically, granddaughter) a literary typist.

• 2017 NPR article here for those who prefer not to engage with platform in question 🙂

Good images, thank you.

unfortunate typo!

Negative space.
Not nagative space

@NitroNine thank you for those. I'm definitely interested!

I got what you meant!

You’re very welcome @MouseMinge - I didn’t want to give you The Rage with the pattern of injustices “Thanks For Typing” highlights; but it does make interesting, if frequently infuriating, reading. (Utter scandal how many female [co-]authors have been reduced to a brief mention that not-infrequently glosses over it’s their own research/calculations/general work they’ve typed up 🤬) The Dickens essay is as balm to the soul in comparison 😄

I feel like I should show this article to my mother-in-law, who always addresses my birthday cards to Mrs. Him Him.

@TressiliansStone Thank you for the nice words about both the book and the username - which is pretty much a summary of one part of the book, about how hard it is for women to walk away from home.

This came about basically because I got The Rage at a very well-known nature writer who starts his most famous book by just walking out of the house and shutting the door behind him. I just happened to know - it's not mentioned in his book - that at this point he had two primary age children. And I just thought of all the lists and organisation I would have to do simply to get out o the house for one day. And that's the energy which generated the book.

Women quite often don't only do the typing - Tirzah Garwood is I think one of the saddest stories because she was a better artist than her husband, but guess what happened. Twitter thread about her below if you do this kind of thing:
https://twitter.com/QuadRoyal/status/1648272674441900034

But it's not all doom and gloom - I did also find lots of great women writers about walking and landscape (too many to put in the book) but - surprise surprise - none of them are as well known as the men. Sigh.

And don't even get me started on the bookshop tables of nature writing which are All Men.

There was a brilliant MN thread some years ago about the Facilitated Man, who is able to fulfil his potential at work or in sport or art because he has a cloud of service-humans in the home and workplace removing most of the shitwork from his path so that he can spend his energy on being brilliant.

The service-humans don't have to be female although <newsflash> they often are. And women typically don't have that cloud of service-humans.

It crystallised my thinking like nothing else has.

This pattern is replicated in any situation where a person has other people to act as service-humans. So now I use the concept as a really useful analytical tool: who in any given context has service-humans? To what extent? Who does not have service-humans? Who is a service-human in this context?

(I was initially going to cast this in terms of higher-status people having lower-status people as their service-humans, which is generally the case. But actually there are some occasions where there was no difference in status between the parties beforehand. However there are rather more occasions where the Facilitated Person tries to obfuscate status and to convince the service-humans of the nobility of service or wifedom – purely through fear their own cushy number might cease!)

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/3082251-Men-whose-lives-are-facilitated-by-women-how-did-this-happen?page=3&reply=73232569 thanks @TressiliansStone . I went looking.

It’s funny you should bring this up. Anna Funder was in The Drum this evening in ABC Australia (if you can get round any geoblocking) and she spoke eloquently about the time of her life where her actually very nice DH went off to work each day and she had a huge amount going on at home. So, she started reading Orwell. And one thing led to another. She was fabulous to listen to. I am going to go to Youtube to see what all else she has.

Some amazing posting here. I was struck reading Animal Farm with a class recently that the female characters are vain (Molly the horse) or lazy (the cat)… or just unnamed like all the cows and sheep. I had a discussion with the pupils about it and they felt it was pretty damning of Orwell.

Facilitated Man. That's such a good way of thinking about it, and the associated cloud of service-humans. Am going to think about this a lot - and I will look at the thread this evening. Have also just ordered Wifedom. The collected power of all that might blow my mind.

The examples of facilitated men are everywhere, I agree. Having a set up where a woman is front-and-centre the high achiever (around which everything revolves) is very, very rare. But so often you can scratch the surface and find out that the woman is doing something impressive in a low-key way - the lack of recognition is equally maddening.

But sometimes women are equal partners in choices which are inevitably going to make it more challenging to achieve professional or creative success, whether that is family size, spouse's occupation, where the family lives or even acquiring pets that restrict activity and may require several hours of input per day. So individual choices also accumulate too...

This is raising some very interesting questions about what a fulfilled and happy life might look like.

The assumption we have of a 'successful' person being known, recognised, recorded, prominent. And the thought that obscurity and anonymity are necessarily undesirable things.

I'm just aware of the tendency, too often taken in the past, to automatically presume a trad male path is the 'right' or 'better' path.

I think it's extremely valid to discuss whether trad paths and trad values are "better" or not.

However I think that's a bit of a tangent to this particular thread (though you started the thread, so up to you). But it really doesn't sound as though Eileen found cleaning the outdoor privy made her fulfilled and happy.

But how was it then, for her? Biographers, including Eileen’s biographer Sylvia Topp in her 2020 crowdfunded work Eileen: The Making of George Orwell, imply Eileen’s willing consent to the sudden helpmeet role she found herself in. Comments in the Orwell biographies such as Eileen “even helped clean out the latrine” made it appear like her newlywed enthusiasm extended to helping George clean out the privy. But the truth is she did it alone, and remembered it all her life.

What's more, if cleaning the privy were somehow good for the soul and constituted success on some alternative scale, then what's good for the goose would be good for the gander.

Eric would have cleaned the privy too - and reaped the same spiritual rewards.

Sure. The problem is always the choice, or lack of it.

I might add that whether or not we are happy to clean the privy is also partly to do with the value ascribed to the shitwork by society, but I agree that would be going down a bit of a tangent.