Interview of Anna Funder by Freya Bennett
It was an honour to interview with Anna Funder—award-winning author, incisive historian, and fearless chronicler of forgotten lives—to talk about her groundbreaking book Wifedom. In this deeply researched and passionately argued work, Anna resurrects the life and voice of Eileen O’Shaughnessy, the brilliant and largely invisible wife of George Orwell. Through Eileen’s story, Wifedom exposes the persistent erasure of women’s contributions—intellectual, emotional, creative—from both history and the present day.
Eileen O’Shaughnessy was an intellectual force behind Orwell’s work, yet history largely erased her contributions. How does Wifedom challenge the broader pattern of women’s labor and creativity being overlooked?
Wifedom turned out to be a bit of a detective story. It was ‘cherchez la femme’— like the cliché in detective fiction: find the woman, and you’ll understand the mystery. In this case the mystery is why did Orwell’s writing improve so much after he got married? Who was this brilliant woman who wrote a poem called ‘End of the Century, 1984’ before she met him, and then had the idea for ANIMAL FARM as a novel? And how has she been made to disappear?
Eileen O’Shaughnessy, George Orwell’s wife of his great creative period, barely appears in biographies of him. This means she barely exists in history. I had to go and look at all the sources the biographers had left out. There were lots of fantastically interesting and sometimes shocking things women said about him that were too difficult for the biographers to include.
The most amazing part of my research – more than going to Spain or Scotland or into the archives – involved a very close reading of Orwell’s account of his time fighting in the Spanish Civil War, Homage to Catalonia. You’d barely know from reading that book that Eileen was there too. And you’d never understand that she worked in the political headquarters, saved Orwell’s manuscript, and then saved his life.
After I found Eileen, I wanted not just to bring her back to life. I wanted to show the sometimes sly, swift-and-dirty ways that Orwell, and then his six male biographers had written her out of his story. When really, aside from him, she’s the most important person in it. This seemed to me to represent the broader story of the way, in the world they lived in and the world we live in today still, the work of women as wives is both indispensable and invisible. This is not just so-called domestic work – it includes, as in the case of Orwell, extremely sophisticated intellectual work too. Patriarchy is not over. In fact, it looks like it’s making a virulent, out-and-proud comeback (Trump, Musk, Vance, incels etc). We need to be really on our guard about protecting our bodies, our time and our lives.
There are two broad patterns to women’s labour and creativity being overlooked. The first happens when women are alive and living their lives. It is often harder for women to find not just the time, but the ego to make creative work.
In history it is probably true that fewer women were making creative work, busy as they often were, with the work of love and care of others that was allocated to them. But even for the women who could have been artists – wealthy women, or women in religious communities, for example—it might have been harder to find the ego to do it.
Art and creativity require the basic belief that you have something to say, something to put out there from your vision of the world, that is meaningful. The world in general respects what men say, and what they put out there. Women, though, often feel that they have to ‘prove’ something. In the first instance, themselves. This is one of the fundamental ways patriarchy makes women feel – and then be – peripheral, and men central. And if you are not getting the basic respect for your ideas, your voice, your vision and your self that men have, you’re starting behind the 8-ball as a creator.
The second reason women’s creativity is overlooked is because it gets written out of history. If you are a young man artist, writer or philosopher, you can look behind you to thousands of years of male forefathers. That’s not the case for a woman. Virginia Woolf said “We think back through our mothers if we are women.” But when women creatives look back the track gets a bit cold, thinly populated. It might not be because there were no women writing and creating; it could be just that history left them out of the story, as Eileen was left out of history.
Even when a woman is well-known in her lifetime history will not write her into the story. I noticed this especially when I read Katy Hessel’s THE STORY OF ART WITHOUT MEN. There were women artists who managed to have careers, make exceptional work and be famous and feted in their lifetimes, earn lots of money, get commissions from popes and moguls etc. But then they are left out of the history of art. This of course, makes it harder for women artists who come afterwards, to think of themselves as artists. If you can’t see a big tradition of respected women in your field, you feel like a unicorn: unlikely, and possibly a fiction.
Wifedom looks at all these issues, but in a story. The story of a funny, brilliant woman and her differently funny, brilliant husband. It’s a story through two wars and a behind-the-scenes look at the creation of masterpieces of 20th century literature. My book is meant to thrill a reader, and to make them see the world in a new way. This is what literature should be doing. But also, it’s meant to be – with any luck – an eye-opener: do not let this happen to you! Claim your life, your time, your own brilliance. You don’t owe it to a man; you owe it to yourself, first. Share the domestic and emotional load, so you both (if you’re in a heterosexual relationship) enjoy your time equally on the planet.
Your book highlights the invisible and undervalued work women do—both in relationships and in society. How do you see this playing out today, and what can we do to make women’s contributions more visible?
I’ve spoken here about the ego it takes to be an artist. I mean this in a healthy way: the sense of self to put something you make out into the world, to share your vision. There is the other, more well-known and understood and still current reason too: women do far more of the work of care of men, children, relatives, houses, communities etc, worldwide. To be a ‘good woman’ or a ‘good wife’ or a ‘good mother’ you have to do that work, because that what it means to be a good woman/wife/mother. Whereas to be a ‘good bloke’ you don’t have to do any work; you just have to keep your word. This is a sign that women in patriarchy ‘owe’ a lot of their time to others. Why shouldn’t this work of love and life be shared? Why shouldn’t men be as involved? As connected to children and others and their emotional and physical needs? The world might look different if they were.
I think the fact that always up to a woman to raise these issues in discussions with men they love and live with shows that the work has automatically fallen to her either to do – or to discuss and delegate. Seriously, it’s 2025! We’ve had a century of women’s rights, and yet the UN estimates that every society is underpinned by the unpaid work of women, to the value of US$10.9 trillion. It’s invaluable, indispensable, but also strangely invisible because it’s seen as something that naturally attaches to gender. It doesn’t. Why should it?
This is an issue about not just the wellbeing of women and families, but of nations, economies and the planet. It’s been proven that companies and economies run better the more women are involved in leading them.
We can’t sort this out in private, one difficult conversation per couple at a time. It is a social problem, and it needs a social solution. Just as in the 19th century, some countries decided it would be good for everyone to be literate and established free primary schools and free lending libraries, we need to decide it would be good for everyone to enable women’s full participation on an equal footing in society at every level. We need, in the first place, excellent nationalised (publicly funded, ‘free’) early childhood learning centres, and subsidised lunches provided at schools. Not only is it affordable, it will enrich the economy – by women’s participation, and the wellbeing of future generations of children.
Many women, like Eileen, have had to sacrifice their own ambitions to support the men in their lives. What lessons can we take from her story about reclaiming space and recognition for women’s voices?
The reason women ‘have had to sacrifice their own ambitions’ is absolutely key to this. Why would this be the case? It’s weird isn’t it, when you think about it? The reason it seems normal, is because patriarchy makes the wellbeing and achievement of men possible and central, and women are supporting cast, or caste. We are changing this. We have to – for ourselves, our daughters and our sons. No one gender is more important, or more central than another. No one gender owes another their work and time in life – or ‘sacrifice.’
Sometimes it’s easiest to see what’s happening now, by taking an extreme example of it in the past and telling that story. I didn’t know, when I set out to find Eileen from under the vanishing trick of patriarchal history, just how extreme her story would be. That’s partly because no other biographer has found it extreme, or remotely remarkable or even really looked at it – or at her. She and her brilliant work and voice were invisible to them. Or at any rate, they wanted her to be invisible.
Some people have said that’s ‘just how marriage worked then’. In fact, one man close to the Orwell family told me it was a ‘normal’ marriage for the time. Was it really normal for a husband, who was a repressed homosexual, to be incessantly unfaithful, sexually assaulting women in offices, parks, at parties? Was it normal for him to want his wife to know about much of it? Was it normal then for her to be the breadwinner?
And if all that was ‘normal’ how weird were those times? Would we also say slavery was ‘normal’ in its time? You can see here how ‘normalising’ something is to excuse it from the point of view of the more powerful person. I doubt enslaved people considered their situation ‘normal’. And nor did many of the women around Orwell. It’s just that they had to live with it.
If you look long and carefully enough though at the hidden sources and voices, you can hear the women talk about it, and find out what they really felt. Just because you can’t do anything about a situation of structural powerlessness like slavery or patriarchy doesn’t mean you find it ‘normal’. It’s reality, but it’s bizarre and unjust. We shouldn’t normalise it. We should change it.
If women weren’t erased from history it would be harder to normalise patriarchy. For instance, Orwell’s mother and aunt were feminists and suffragettes. They certainly didn’t find the situation of women ‘normal’. But you wouldn’t know about that from the biographies of him. It’s extraordinary the lengths patriarchy will go to make history into a ‘boys own’ story. Even when that boy was raised by feminists.
Orwell’s reputation as a truth-teller contrasts with his personal life, where truths about Eileen were obscured. What does Wifedom reveal about the power structures that shape whose stories are told and whose are silenced?
Patriarchy is a very powerful organising force in all societies (they vary, but it’s planetary).
Patriarchy works by making men central, and women peripheral. It works by making a man the hero of the story, or a writing genius who accomplished it all on his own. Indeed, he owes no woman anything: no intellectual feminist mother or aunt, no literary girlfriend, no brilliant wife.
And, on the other hand, the myth goes, the sense of power he has both as a man and as a creative, is something he was born with. So the women he used or mistreated or assaulted in order to feel that power must also be eliminated from the narrative. The story patriarchy tells of male genius is that the man needed no help, and did no harm. Neither of those things are true in Orwell’s case.
And probably the most remarkable thing about this is that it was not found remarkable—then, or now. Patriarchy normalises this labour and talent theft, and this mistreatment of women. That is how it works. Writing Wifedom was a revelation to me, not only about Eileen, but about this basis of the world we still live in, and which we must change.
Your work often uncovers hidden histories of women. What advice would you give to writers or researchers who want to bring overlooked female voices to the forefront?
Go for it! There is something incredibly exciting as a writer – and a person – to be uncovering untold stories. And because of 10,000 years of patriarchy, there are a lot of untold stories about women out there to tell.
And it’s not just about doing posthumous justice of some kind to those women. It’s important that we know about lots of women in all areas in history, so that we know that they did things, and so can we. Despite 100 years of movement towards women’s rights in the world, everywhere men still have most of the power, most of the money and most of the leisure time. We have a way to go, more stories to tell.
