Mr. and Mrs. Orwell

August 27, 2023

ORWELL: The New Life, by D.J. Taylor

WIFEDOM: Mrs. Orwell’s Invisible Life, by Anna Funder

It was a rainy day in January 2017, the clocks were striking (almost) 13, Donald Trump was being sworn in as president of the United States, and George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four” was about to go flying to the No. 1 spot on Amazon’s sales list. Something made people curious to read about the weaponization of hate, the theatrics of power, the mutability of truth, the corruption of language, “Ignorance is strength” and “doublethink” — the ability to believe contradictory ideas while blanking out awareness of the contradiction.

It was not the first time the book had struck a chord. Released into a Cold War world in 1949, it sold out almost immediately. When the author died in January the following year, he lived on as an adjective, “Orwellian” (meaning everything he warned against), and as a figure of transcendent moral authority. But can anyone, dead or not, live up to such a role? Of course not, and Orwell’s biographers have struggled to find a balance between his thoroughly impressive life’s work and his — to put it gently — oddities and weaknesses.

The worst of the latter concern his dealings with women. He was compulsively unfaithful, and would pounce on female acquaintances who sometimes had to fight him off physically, especially if they found themselves in a forest or heath with him. (Nature, for Orwell, held an erotic charge.) Yet he did not seem to like women much as human beings. He wrote incel-ish, misogynistic rants for male protagonists of his fiction. And even he admitted that he behaved badly to his first wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy. All of this creates a problem for writers and readers, myself included, who admire Orwell and seek guidance from him in how to think about tyranny and oppression.

This year sees two interesting responses to the problem. One is by D.J. Taylor, the author of “Orwell: The Life” (2003), who supersedes that biography with a new one, sensibly called “Orwell: The New Life.” The other response is more radical: Anna Funder’s “Wifedom: Mrs. Orwell’s Invisible Life.” Funder, the author of “Stasiland,” focuses on O’Shaughnessy, and combines her story with a general analysis of female invisibility.

Let’s start with Taylor. He traces the usual biographical arc, from Orwell’s birth in Bengal in 1903 to his death from tuberculosis in 1950, via boarding-school sufferings, a spell in the Burma colonial police, hobo-ing in Paris and London, fighting in the Spanish Civil War, and his two very different marriages: the first, long one with Eileen, and the second, to Sonia Brownell, conducted on his deathbed and thus necessarily short. Taylor adds interesting sidelights. I like his thematic mini-chapters, on such topics as Orwell and rats (he hated them), Orwell and toads (he loved them, as symbols of old-fashioned English nature, though there is no sign he wanted to have sex with them), and “Orwell and the ‘Nancy Boys,’” which explores a horror of homosexuality so extreme that Taylor, like others, wonders whether Orwell was protesting too much.

One reason Taylor gives for writing a new book is the material unearthed by researchers since the previous version. Among these finds, in 2005, was a set of six letters from Eileen to her friend Norah Symes Myles. These have been published before, but they give Taylor a valuable insight into what it would have been like to live with Orwell. They also illuminate Eileen herself; from being a shadowy figure, not least because Orwell himself had so little to say about her, she emerges as a woman who was wittily, laughingly, intelligently alive, but who fades before our eyes as time goes on.

This attrition is the central thread of Funder’s book. Hers is not the first biography of Eileen; both she and Taylor praise Sylvia Topp’s “Eileen: The Making of George Orwell” (2020). But Funder does a virtuoso performance on the theme, adding personal memoir, some fictional reconstructions and a glittering sense of purpose. “I wanted to make her live,” she writes of Eileen, “and at the same time to reveal the wicked magic trick that had erased her.” By “magic,” she means the prestidigitation that so often makes women disappear, in life and in books. Biographers of men often do it unconsciously by expressing actions in passive or impersonal constructions, so that houses are rented and furnished, and literary parties are held. Authors’ manuscripts apparently type themselves and edit themselves, or even suggest beneficial improvements to themselves. The women behind these miracles are unnamed and unseen.

Eileen’s life is rich in examples. Born in 1905, she started with zest: She studied English at Oxford, wrote journalism and poetry, and had just started a postgraduate degree in psychology when she met Orwell (or, rather, Eric Blair — his real name) at a party. She liked him; he was bowled over by her, and announced to a friend, “Eileen O’Shaughnessy is the girl I want to marry.” So he did. When they signed the marriage certificate, he put “Author” in the Profession column, but she put only a dash, to signify “none” or “not applicable.” The erasure had begun.

Their honeymoon was rocky; Eileen joked to Norah that the marriage might soon end in “murder or separation.” But they survived. When Orwell signed up to fight fascists in Spain in 1936, Eileen went too. Funder pieces together the extensive, often dangerous work she did there — managing supplies and communications for the cause, procuring visas and hiding passports so they could leave safely. Yet you would never know that from Orwell’s “Homage to Catalonia.” He mentions her 37 times, but only as “my wife,” and he makes it sound as though she did little more than sit in a Barcelona hotel room.

Similar obscurity covers the work Eileen did in the Second World War: Initially, she was the couple’s main earner, working first in the (very “Orwellian”) Censorship Department of the Ministry of Information, and then for the Ministry of Food. Orwell could not join up to fight, because of his deteriorating health. In fact, Eileen was also seriously ill. After suffering a series of hemorrhages, she was diagnosed with uterine tumors. Two doctors advised a hysterectomy; one thought she should wait for a transfusion to restore her blood levels first, while the other thought it better to operate immediately.

Eileen wrote a long, anguished letter to her husband, now away as a war correspondent in France. The letter is filled with her doubts, not so much about the operation itself as about the expense; she wishes she could have sought Orwell’s advice before spending “his” funds. She adds, “What worries me is that I really don’t think I’m worth the money.” This may be intended as a wry joke, but it is a revealing one. Taylor calls it “a terrible moment,” while Funder sees the whole 4,000-word outpouring as “the most terrifying letter.” It was not forwarded to Orwell promptly, so he knew nothing of what ensued, which was that Eileen took a bus, alone, to the hospital, to have the operation recommended by the second doctor. She died on the operating table.

Shocked, Orwell threw himself chaotically into trying to find a replacement. Over a short period, he asked four women to marry him, including Sonia Brownell. She turned him down the first time, but accepted his late-stage second try. Taylor wonders why, and is left with the quasi explanation Brownell herself once gave to a friend: “I don’t know. … I felt sorry for him.”

Both women remain a little enigmatic in Taylor’s narrative. For Funder, this is not enough; biographers are too willing to leave women as figures of mystery. Instead, she squeezes every drop from the sources, to make Eileen real. She does the same with other women in the story, notably Orwell’s vigorous “Aunt Nellie” Limouzin, a socialist and feminist who popped up throughout his life to help him with accommodation, jobs and literary contacts.

Funder stresses that she has no wish to “cancel” Orwell, a writer she finds inspiring. Her aim is rather to rescue Eileen and other women from having been canceled themselves. She sees Orwell’s biographers as colluding with him to keep the women invisible and omit their particularities. In an ironic twist, she does the same to them, usually calling them “the biographers” without distinguishing their individual merits. One visualizes a phalanx of men, advancing arm in arm.

One of these men is, of course, D.J. Taylor, for his earlier book rather than the new one. So, how does he now measure up to Funder’s challenge?

The verdict, I think, is mixed. Many women who loom large in Funder’s account are mentioned only briefly in his, but that is fair enough in a one-subject biography. More avoidable are tone-deaf moments, as when he calls Orwell’s habit of making passes at Eileen’s friends “nest-fouling”: men’s-club badinage that deposits Eileen in a stay-at-home bowl of twigs. (Can we imagine using such a phrase if the genders were reversed?) Worse, he mentions a conference at which the distinguished feminist Beatrix Campbell spoke about male bias in Orwell’s study of northern English poverty, “The Road to Wigan Pier.” For Taylor, listening to this was “like watching a small child trying to bring down an elephant with a peashooter.” That line could have done the author a favor by editing itself out.

But Taylor also unpicks Orwell’s “saintly” image, to reveal a peculiarly limited man whose worldview “glows with unreality.” Here is someone who, having trashed a fellow writer’s work in a review, seemed amazed that the writer might be reluctant to socialize with him. He dressed as a tramp and idealized the poor, yet his grasp of their actual lives was vague. As Taylor says of Wigan, “For all his assiduousness in collecting housing statistics, it is remarkable how little Orwell actually sees there.” He notes Orwell’s tendency to put people into sweeping categories: to call a person “a fairly typical petty criminal,” or a group “a pretty low lot,” and see little beyond that. No wonder he was just as limited in seeing women.

Although they approach the matter from different angles, both of these writers problematize the Orwell myth and try to work out what he can and cannot do for us. Both make use of Orwell’s own intellectual tools: his exposure of doublethink and of the magic tricks of oppression, his championing of those who suffer, and his commitment to clear thought. Funder and Taylor deploy all this to throw light on the people Orwell failed to notice or fully understand — including, perhaps, himself.

Sarah Bakewell is the author of “Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope.”

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