Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life

by Anna Funder

The biographers are helped by Orwell himself erasing or obscuring the women in his life. He writes, for instance, to his teenage love, the wealthy, literary young woman Jacintha, saying that she ‘abandoned him to Burma’, leaving out that after their last meeting – a ‘walk’ in the countryside – something happened that made her run traumatised into her family’s house with ‘a torn skirt and a tear-stained face like thunder’. It’s not that he didn’t know how she felt: she’d written to him afterwards, ‘telling him of her disgust and shock that he should try and FORCE her to let him make love to her . . . He had held her down (by that time he was 6' 4" and she was still under 5') and though she struggled, yelling at him to STOP, he had torn her skirt and badly bruised a shoulder and her left hip.’

I have more highlights from this book than any other I have read. Orwell is relentlessly awful to the women in his life.