I’m not usually a big non-fiction reader (I tend to reach for truth woven through story), but Wifedom intrigued me — both because I am a fan of George Orwell’s work and I’ve long been fascinated by the lives of women who stand just outside the spotlight of history’s celebrated men.
In Wifedom, Anna Funder traces the quiet erasure of Eileen O’Shaughnessy (Mrs Orwell) a scholar and writer who studied at Oxford and UCL, worked as a journalist and civil servant, supported Orwell through illness, and for a time kept them both afloat. The title 1984 even echoes a poem she wrote before they met.
Yet Eileen appears only in the margins of Orwell’s published work and the major biographies written about him. Her contributions are minimised, often narrated in the passive voice, and so quietly erased from his story. Funder returns to primary sources — including six letters from Eileen discovered in 2005 — to restore her voice and agency.
Lucid and deeply self-reflective, Funder turns the lens on the long shadow of what it means to be a wife: the helper, the supporter, the one that keeps the cogs and gears of daily life going and asks the uncomfortable question: Does a wife’s time belong to her husband?
For Orwell it did.
Eileen’s tending of the small-holding, the arranging of logistics, the editing and typing created the space for Orwell to work, to write, to produce the extraordinary books we still read today. Yet she remained just a vague outline on the margins of his pages, absent from any full acknowledgement of her wartime role, her labour, her presence.
It made me think about the invisible scaffolding of creativity and success: the care, time and labour that rarely make it into the official record.
Wifedom invites us to look again at the narratives we inherit, and to consider how we might tell them differently — with more space for those who have been in the wings, holding everything together.
The questions Funder raises about credit and visibility feel relevant far beyond literature. How do we make sure everyone’s contribution is seen where we work? Perhaps we all have an Eileen somewhere in our story.
