Wifedom: The Invisible Life of Eileen Blair, Orwell’s First Wife

A riveting work about the woman who sacrificed her future for one of the most famous writers of the twentieth century and a probing look at what it means to be a wife, and a writer, in the modern world.

George Orwell (whose real name was Eric Blair) and Eileen O'Shaughnessy had an unhappy marriage. He was inattentive, distracted, always writing. But she, too, was a writer-Oxford-educated, sharp-witted-though she was expected to take on the subservient role to her husband’s burgeoning career. She did, and the result was his success, and her resentment; his fame, and her erasure.

Anna Funder is drawn to Eileen. Weaving together her own experiences as a writer, a mother, and a modern wife, Funder dissects Eileen’s life as a wife during the early twentieth century. Using recently-discovered letters from Eileen, George, and their friends, Funder creates a vividly sharp portrait of the two: their ceaseless arguments in the first days of marriage, his fidelity to his work, her support of it despite her own career, and, finally, the ultimate crime: Eileen’s disappearance from the literary and historical map of the time. Eileen had suffered from what Funder describes as the vanishing trick, society’s tendency to overlook what men do to women, and what women do for men.

A richly told biographical narrative that restores Eileen O'Shaughnessy to her rightful place in literary history, Wifedom is also a powerful consideration of female servitude and male privilege-and a bracing tribute to the many women who sacrificed their own happiness for their partners’ success.