Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life

by Anna Funder

They tell me all this quietly, as if it were something that should have been fixed long ago, and as if it were up to each of them, alone, to sort out. Another item on their to-do list: birthday present for Saturday/get chairs fixed/anti-fungal/dog: leptospirosis vaccination/make work and self visible/fix patriarchy.

In fact, as Lydia knows, Eileen would have ‘dearly liked to go to Spain with him, but this could not be arranged at the time’. Eileen must stay to look after the shop, the animals, the vegetable garden, his publication schedule, proofs and all correspondence. A wife gives a man a double life: one to go off in, and another to come back to.

The revolutionaries quickly outlawed tipping, the capitalist custom by which the undertaxed get to feel generous at whim in a world of the underpaid.

After I had pieced together Eileen’s time in Spain I still puzzled over how I could have read Homage to Catalonia twice before and never understood she was there. Eileen had worked at the political headquarters, visited him at the front, cared for him when wounded, saved Orwell’s manuscript by giving it to McNair, saved the passports, saved Orwell from almost certain arrest at the hotel, and somehow got the visas to save them all. How is it that she remains invisible? I scanned through the electronic text of the book. Orwell mentions ‘my wife’ thirty-seven times. And then I see: not once is Eileen named. No character can come to life without a name. But from a wife, which is a job description, it can all be stolen.

So here it is. The difficulty about the Spanish war is that it still dominates our lives in a most unreasonable manner because George (or do you call him Eric?) is just finishing the book about it and I give him typescripts the reverse sides of which are covered with manuscript emendations that he can’t read and he is always having to speak about it and I have returned to complete pacifism . . . She puts the cigarette down and looks at the crumpled letter. Then starts typing again. War is fun so far as the shooting goes . . . but hardly anyone can stay reasonable, let alone honest.

A kiss – especially a first kiss – is not just a kiss. It is a situation a woman must navigate. The options for her are prude/slut or humourless bitch/accomplice, and the slash that divides them is the slimmest of terrains in which a woman might first find, and then satisfy, her own desire.

And Ruth notices something odd, something new, something she doesn’t like: Eileen is ‘anxious’ to core the apples properly for a pie, because Orwell doesn’t like it when he finds any tiny hard bits left in. It is the tiny hard bits like this that I don’t like, though I leave them in.

She doesn’t comment further on what seems, from my vantage point, to have been their arms race to mutual self-destruction: she by selflessness, and he by disappearing into the greedy double life that is the artist’s, of self + work.

I have hundreds of friends, but no woman who takes an interest in me and can encourage me . . . Of course it’s absurd a person like me wanting to make love to someone of your age. I do want to, but, if you understand, I wouldn’t be offended or even hurt if you simply say no. Then he offers to send her some novels which have been banned for sexual obscenity, but which he has managed to get illegally.

To write this book I have used another voice for parts of it – Eileen’s – because I lost the one I had. I retrieved Eileen from behind the Cerberus, from under the ignoring, minimising and passive-voicing. I retrieved her from under her own self-erasure, her attentive listening. When I found her I could see what such forces – and I, as co-conspirator – had done to me.