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.
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”. Since the subject’s short life has left fewer traces than her husband’s, Funder enriches the facts with brief, novelistic sketches, allowing us to see this invisible woman anew.
“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. Writing women back into the story means not only seeing them, but seeing them in all their complexity, as in another striking work of salvage, The Five, by Hallie Rubenhold.
Where most accounts have fixated luridly on the murders of the victims of Jack the Ripper, and the identity of their killer, Rubenhold is interested in their lives. In the pattern Dr Hughes pinpointed, they are usually remembered as prostitutes, though there is no evidence that three of the five were involved in sex work. Supplementing the biographical scraps she excavates with other contemporary sources, she builds rich portraits of them. One had become homeless due to alcoholism following family tragedy; another due to a husband’s adultery. It turns out that there is plenty to say about the lives of Mary Ann “Polly” Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes and Mary Jane Kelly – and it is more interesting than their deaths.
These books not only explore who these women really were, but raise the question of who they might have been in a world which recognised and left space for their talents, was less judgmental of their frailties, and did not raise them to subsume themselves to others. The authors do not just rediscover their subjects, and redraw our understanding of the men and the society around them. They ensure that readers may never look at histories and biographies in quite the same way again, without wondering who, and what, is missing from the picture.
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