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Anna Funder: “Orwell was sadistic, paranoid and misogynistic”
The author of ‘Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life’ on Eileen O’Shaughnessy, George Orwell’s first wife, and her under appreciated role in his work and life
How does your experience as an international human rights lawyer help you as an author? What skills did you pick up in your previous career and continue to rely on?
I was a lawyer briefly and a bad one. I was very young when I stopped. What has stayed with me is the training in trying to identify the very heart of an issue so that you can ask the right questions. I have also retained a sense of what lawyers call natural justice, which means that you have to consider the opposing view, almost with as much energy, to make sure that you are being fair. This approach has been very important to me in all my work.
Lawyers are also trained to dig dirt on people, which is what you do very well with your book Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life. How was that experience for you?
(laughs) Digging dirt on author George Orwell was not my aim but I was very shocked at what I found. Well, I think that he was a repressed homosexual. There is a lot of evidence for that. He co-wrote the novella Animal Farm with his wife Eileen O’Shaughnessy. It was her idea to write that book, and her voice is very much in it. And it looks like she saved Orwell’s life during the Spanish Civil War. I also didn’t know that he was so enormously unfaithful to Eileen.
Besides all this, he was sort of irresponsible in other ways. He almost had his nieces and nephews killed in a boating accident, which was very preventable. He was a bit reckless with his own life and with others’ lives as well. These discoveries about his life were unexpected.
Your approach to his life seems like that of an archaeologist or a detective. Please tell us about your research.
With the sort of legal mind that I have, I really try to get all the facts right. That’s why this book has a huge number of endnotes to tie in everything to fact. That said, I want the reading experience to be seamless. I want people to inhale this book. I want it to be so exciting that you just keep going. Research helps. I went to Spain where Orwell and Eileen lived during the Spanish Civil War. I paid a visit to the trenches in Aragon, and I walked around Barcelona. Orwell was fighting in the war, and Eileen was working for a Marxist political party. I also went to a remote island called Jura off the coast of Scotland and spent some time in the house where Orwell wrote his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. I went into the bedroom where he lay as a very ill man recovering from tuberculosis and typed out his book. It was so moving to be there! In addition, I went to some archives in London for primary research. I also read six major biographies of Orwell quite closely. The accounts of his life vary across books. I was keen to examine how his life has been written up and how Eileen has been written out of it.
What makes Eileen an attractive personality for you?
Well, everybody loved her and I think I know the reason why. One of her friends was a novelist and wrote her into a character in a novel. Eileen had an ability to listen deeply. She made people feel seen and heard. She had the generosity of spirit to really think about something from someone else’s point of view. She could sense how they were feeling.
If you could plan a girls’ day out with Eileen, where would you take her?
I live in Sydney, so I would take Eileen for a long walk along the cliff tops and the beach. We’d look across the ocean at the lighthouse and just talk and talk and talk. I would ask her a lot of questions. I want to know how much she loved Orwell, though one can never quantify love, or how much he and his work were a way for her to write before she found the confidence to write on her own. She was the one who took up jobs to support them financially. She worked in the Department of Censorship in the Ministry of Information in London during the Second World War. And later she worked at the Ministry of Food. The ministries that Orwell writes about in Nineteen Eighty-Four were informed by her work. Eileen was fabulous!
Was Eileen bitter about Orwell taking credit for her work, or would you call her a doormat?
No, Eileen was in no way a doormat. But I don’t think that she was bitter either. She was extremely intelligent. Once, she said that Orwell had “a remarkable political simplicity” whereas she was a very sophisticated political thinker. One of the biographers quoted her as saying that he had “a remarkable political sympathy”. My research showed me how biographers changed the words because they could not bear their hero, Orwell, to have a wife who was cleverer. I think Eileen was happy that she was improving his work. Of course, she was pleased with Animal Farm. It is really an almost perfect novel. Orwell and Eileen wrote it together.
Your book completely changes the way fans look at Orwell’s life and work. What are your thoughts on recent allegations of sexual assault against author Neil Gaiman, and how they are changing the way fans approach his work?
This issue applies to a lot of male figures throughout history because patriarchy allows men to have a public reputation that is decent, and then do things in private to women and sometimes children. The crimes that they commit are edited out of the story. Shame works to silence women and children who are victims of sexual abuse. We are seeing this with Neil Gaiman now but we have seen this with Woody Allen too. People don’t seem to care about it.
Things get complicated when you are talking about an artist because artists are often looking at things right out on the edge of what it is to be human. We want works of art to frighten us or to reveal things that we are refusing to see. They go to the edge of what is acceptable. They write out of their flaws at times. Orwell was sadistic, paranoid and misogynistic. You see all these aspects represented in his book Nineteen Eighty-Four. People don’t seem to mind them.
I haven’t read Neil Gaiman before and I don’t plan to read him now. I hope there is justice for the women involved because terrible things seem to have happened. But my 15-year-old son is reading his book at the moment and I am not telling him about the allegations that have come out. He is 15, and I just want him to have this experience of reading the book without knowing all of that. Personally, what I know about Orwell doesn’t bother me. I am happy to read his work. I am not less fond of him. I see him as a much more complex man. The superhero version of Orwell is fictitious, and someone who was so vanilla could never have written those books.
You stand on the shoulders of several feminist historians and activists. Please talk about those who have influenced your work.
The work of Adrienne Rich, the American poet and essayist, has been very important to me. She was an extraordinary thinker about women and men, and sexuality. Her essay, Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence is among my favourites. She had a beautiful way with language because she was a poet, a fearless person, and unbelievably smart.
Resistance is a theme that runs across your books. All That I Am revolves around people who resist the Nazis. In Stasiland, you write about people who resist the secret police in East Germany. Wifedom is about Eileen who resisted patriarchy in her own quiet and dignified way. What makes you return to this theme in every book?
This is a very deep psychological question. How much time do you have? (laughs) Firstly, because I’m interested in human courage and human conscience, and those things are to be seen most clearly in extreme situations where they are called into being. We need to think about resistance today because we live in a surveillance society of the kind that the Stasi could only have dreamt of. Despite the risks, people are resisting today. They are questioning, for instance, what Donald Trump is doing. Stories of resistance are appealing to me as a novelist because they are about what it means to be human, to be brave, to take action and be a hero.
I grew up in an upper-middle class left-wing household. As a child, I was very aware that a lot of power was being exercised over me. I grew up observing my parents as powerful intellectual giants running the regime, if you want to call it, of the family. That was a deeply formative experience for me. There was a lot of argument around the dinner table. It was ostensibly intellectual but it also had a lot of emotional force. As a writer you are always looking at what’s really going on under the surface. My childhood was my training in looking at powerful people, hearing what they were saying and then sensing what was going on at an emotional level.
Chintan Girish Modi is a journalist, educator and literary critic. He can be reached @chintanwriting on Instagram and X.
