Wifedom: Mrs. Orwell's Invisible 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. I would look under the motherload of wifedom I had taken on, and see who was left.”

Anna Funder puts herself directly into the book, making it clear that the inspiration of the book arose from her sense that The Nature of Invisible Labor was weighing too heavily on her. She desires to reclaim her own individuality so that her children can see her as a person who is separate from her role as mother, and this impetus drives her to make Eileen visible in the book.

“There seemed to be no way for the biographers to deal with the anti-woman, anti-wife, anti-sex rant other than by leaving it out, sympathising with the impulse, trivialising it as a ‘mood’, denying it as ‘fiction’ or blaming the woman herself.”

Orwell’s rant about the difficulty with wives initially sparks Funder to research Eileen. Funder observes that the response of other male writers is to explain away the problematic passage in various ways, and her analysis highlights How Fiction and Truth Overlap. By arguing that Orwell was only writing fiction, the other writers deny the underlying truth expressed by that fiction.

“In this system the oppressors can imagine themselves innocent of crimes against a people, not by denying the crimes, but by denying the equal humanity of the people.”

Orwell describes the evils of racism in colonialism in his first book, and Funder uses that same logic to expose the subtle sexism in the world of literature and biography. Orwell and his biographers do not deny his abusive behavior toward women, but by ignoring the impact of the women who greatly influenced Orwell’s life, they devalue the humanity of those women.