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.'

Homo facilius. Yes - very well explained.

But if the Orwells had had a bit more money and the privy had been cleaned by a housemaid, then no one would think to mention it at all...

Perhaps this is why there is a trope of great artists living in a degree of squalor? Because at some point you have to decide not to wash that cup, file away those papers or tidy up your workroom/office/studio if anything is going to get painted, sculpted or written.

This is quite an interesting book (I got halfway through before getting distracted) on the trope of bohemian artists' lives. It makes the point quite well that most artists living in 'squalor' had come from privileged backgrounds and chose to reject their backgrounds; yet many still had cushions of wealth and support to fall back on.

http://www.virginianicholson.co.uk/among-bohemians

There's Clover as well.

Isn’t the “squalor” often effectively a form of performance art for lots of them too? Used to signal “artistic genius at work” & fact they cannot be expected to conform to social expectations/niceties; whether that’s in terms of clothing, manners, or sex & relationships.

I don’t think of it quite so cynically. To my mind, creativity takes time and focus. Whereas even surface tidying-up is never-ending and still has to be done even if you did it last week. So I guess some people do decide to let it go and just focus on their work or creative endeavours.

'I wandered lonely' is one of my favourite poems and I'd never seen this poem before - it's fab. Thanks for sharing

Fascinating thread - will definitely look at getting the book.

<cough> sometimes it's just absent mindedness.

This is such a good comment I just wanted to immortalize it for myself.

You're forgetting Clover, another horse and close friend of Boxer.

I think there is (or was) a mystery as to what happened to all Orwell’s money.
From the Guardian:
By 1980, when she died, these titles alone had sold 30 million. Yet Sonia died in a grotty bedsit, without money to pay for her own funeral.

@Andante57
Orwell set things up so his money went into a Trust, from which Sonia drew a widow’s pension. She didn’t manage to get control of the copyright from the account who’d control of the Trust - & who’d been keeping her in poverty - until a fortnight before her death, when it passed to Orwell’s adopted son. For obvious reasons nobody’s actually said so, but Occam’s Razor suggests the account trousered the cash for himself & cooked the books to cover it up.

NitroNine that’s interesting. Was the accountant ever taken to task about it?

I participated in the Facilitated Man thread. It was very interesting. Also infuriating.

I read a biography of Dorothy Hodgson once. Her husband was some kind of big cheese in the colonial services so she could only do her groundbreaking crystallography work because her sister moved in to take care of the kids. Also the lab she used was down a step so all that delicate work could have been destroyed in an instant. What a metaphor!

I don’t think so Andante - I remembered the coverage at the time her biography was published & presumably there was enough evidence to get control of things back to the family, but the accountant was smart enough to hide any creative accounting. If they did any, which they may not have, it’s just the obvious conclusion to draw!

That’s interesting Nitronine. Presumably his son then owned the copyright.

As someone brought up to look after her brothers, I've often looked with interest at accounts of highly talented sisters of famous brothers.
Gwen John is one.
Yeats' sisters featured in the Guardian recently too.

@PriOn1 a book from Julia's POV is coming out soon
https://www.harpercollins.com/products/julia-sandra-newman?variant=41007957934114

Interesting that Scottish records are better but Scottish women don’t keep their names when they marry. My Scottish mum was appalled when I kept mine!

Traditionally they did, though. You can see it on old gravestones. Often they had odd 'feminised' male names, though - Williamina, Edwardina, etc.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/26610847

'In Scotland, an independent country until 1707 (and unlike England, which was subject to the doctrine of “coverture”), it was normal for a woman to keep her maiden name (patronymic) after marriage. During the nineteenth century, especially in Victorian times, women tended to become known by their married name (Mrs + husband’s name) in everyday life. But the practice of recording their names on tombstones has remained to the present day, giving a woman’s original name, without any other formula (illustrated from a cemetery in Edinburgh).'

It is interesting. Comprehensive list of famous siblings here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sibling_pairs

Here are some where the sisters seem to have equalled or exceeded their brothers' success/fame.

The Brontes - although Branwell is only famous because of his sisters.
Christina Rossetti.
Shirley Maclaine.
Karen Carpenter.
Joan Cusack.
Jane Fonda.
Vanessa Redgrave.
Lily Allen.

Fanny Mendelssohn, though ...

Very typical newspaper announcement from 1835:
^DIED.
On the 20th Jan., at 83, Great King-street, Edinburgh, Mrs. Agatha Boog, relict of the late William Laughton, Esq., of London.^

Agatha's maiden name was Boog. When she married she changed from Miss Agatha Boog to Mrs Agatha Boog. During the life of her husband, she may also have been known as Mrs Laughton in many contexts. Different people followed different conventions.

Interestingly, this notice appeared in a London newspaper. However it was probably put in by the Edinburgh family or copied verbatim from an Edinburgh paper by the London paper (copying was common).

I have read literally thousands of original C18th, C19th & early C20th Scottish documents referring to women (newspaper articles, wills, tax records...). The form "Agatha Boog or Laughton" is at least as common as dropping the maiden name for much of this period.