More to a woman
The Guardian last month on Orwell and women:
George Orwell’s first wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy, made his work possible at the cost of her own by taking on the household drudgery and typing up his writing instead of completing her master’s in psychology. But Wifedom, a remarkable new book by Anna Funder, shows there was much more to a woman who appears only fleetingly in her husband’s work and is poorly served by his biographers. Shortly before meeting Orwell she wrote a dystopian poem titled End of the Century, 1984; she suggested that he write an animal fable instead of an essay denouncing Stalinism; and she noted her husband’s “extraordinary political simplicity”. In Homage to Catalonia, Orwell mentions a shopping trip they make to buy stockings in Barcelona – but not that she had a political job in the offices of Poum (the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification), for whom he fought in the civil war; nor that she took significant risks to get them and others out of the country after Stalin ordered his men to liquidate the party. She took risks, too, to save the manuscript.
But she was a woman, so he couldn’t really see her. He was one of those men.
Funder greatly admires Orwell’s work; she does not want it to be “cancelled” by her unflattering portrait of him, especially his shoddy treatment of his wife. But she also notes that O’Shaughnessy “has been cancelled already – by patriarchy”; that is, “buried first by domesticity, and then by history”. Funder says she writes for the same reasons Orwell himself gave – “because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention”…
“Women have always been 50% of the population, but only occupy about 0.5% of recorded history,” the historian Dr Bettany Hughes has observed. Even those who are remembered, she notes, “aren’t allowed to be characters … they have to be stereotypes”: Cleopatra is remembered as a seductress, not for her talents in maths and philosophy.
That’s what I mean by not really seeing. Women are like shadows, ghosts, passing thoughts. They don’t matter much. They have little substance. Nobody cares. (“Nobody” of course means “no men” – women don’t get to be anybody or somebody. Neutral nouns of that kind refer to generic men, not generic people.)
Anna Funder’s book is a brilliantly written and forensic analysis (she is a trained lawyer, and acutely sensitive to words and what they don’t say, but nevertheless express) of Orwell’s bullying & abuse – sexual & otherwise – of women, including his wife, and his moral cowardice where those women closest to him were concerned. As i read, I found myself almost trembling with rage at times, racked with guilt at my own deficiencies at others, but, above all, appalled throughout at the manipulativeness, cruelty & furtive hypocrisy of Orwell.
I am not, as it happens, a great admirer of Orwell, apart from ‘Animal Farm’, the idea for which came from Eileen Orwell, who also, as Funder makes clear, made a great contribution to the wit of its writing. I have always felt that there is a kind of dead puritanism at Orwell’s heart, something ‘cabin’d, cribbed, confined’, a hatred of exuberance and joy, which has a lot to do with his prurience, his furtive & unpleasant sexual adventures, his wheedling advances to various women, whether in person or by letter, & his rapes (yes!) or attempts at them. Not to mention his fundamental dislike of working-class people, even as he seeks to appear to be on their side.
I recommend Funder’s book to everyone. It is excellent, and as devastating for the reader as it is to the gilded memory of George Orwell.
[…] a comment by Tim Harris on More to a […]
Hmm. ‘Homage to Catalonia’ includes a description of Eileen facing down a secret police search party at their apartment. Successfully keeping them from finding books and papers that could have got her shot.
A very incomplete description though according to Funder. I haven’t read the book yet (definitely intend to) but there was a Radio 4 thing about it a couple of weeks ago, in which she gave a lot of detail about O’Shaughnessy’s role that Orwell left out – like for instance the fact that the papers implicated a lot of POUM members, not just herself.
Also it wasn’t a description of Eileen doing that, or of O’Shaughnessy doing it, but of “my wife” doing it.
Here’s the passage, courtesy of Project Gutenberg:
He makes it sound like an accident, and gives no credit to “his wife’s” cunning and resourcefulness. She didn’t just happen to be lying in the bed: she had removed the papers from their previous hiding place behind the toilet cistern (where the police searched) and put them under the mattress then lay on top of them.
Finder was interviewed a few weeks back by Kim Hill on the RNZ National Saturday Morning show. Highly recommended. Available both from the RNZ website or as a podcast.
Another brilliant anatomy of misogyny is Claire Keegan’s brief novella or short story ‘So Late in the Day’, which has recently been published. I recommend this highly as well.