A review by katiealex72
Wifedom: Mrs. Orwell's Invisible Life by Anna Funder

challenging emotional informative sad tense medium-paced

5.0

I’m a fan of Funder’s work, so was predisposed to interest in her new book but even so, this blows me away. The research seems thorough and very sound (I’m not going to pretend I’ve looked up any of the sources! But it’s meticulously footnoted (at the end so as not to distract from the story) and referenced. So I don’t find anything here that I can’t believe. 

It’s best not to know too much going in to it, even (or especially)  if you’ve read Orwell’s writings, because the facts of Eileen Blair’s married life can unfold before you in all it’s horrible, enraging unfairness. I will say that one of the central questions of the book is: to what extent can one separate the artist from the work they create? - which has gripped us all from Michael Jackson to  Kevin Spacey to Bill Cosby. Funder invites us, almost reluctantly, to consider the artist Orwell through the eyes of Eileen for a change, and make our judgement accordingly. 

To say that she was long-suffering is to significantly understate it. And it’s not a spoiler to say that he didn’t beat Eileen, or rape her, or molest their child or anything like that. It’s far more pernicious than that. And Funder’s research points quite clearly to the fact that Orwell’s cruelty and uninterest in Eileen as anything other than a kind of beast of burden, or a helpmeet, was deliberate, not just thoughtless.

My own answer to the question above is that I can and do separate the work from the artist. They are not their work and the work isn’t them. I think though that a book such as this makes it clear that feminist scholarship is incredibly important when it comes to events and figures from history.