The world was set up to treat women badly

By Philippa Tracy

Who was Eileen O’Shaughnessy? She is perhaps better known as the first wife of writer George Orwell (Eric Blair). In a particularly burdensome moment of what she calls “a motherload of wifedom,” the writer Anna Funder turned to Orwell for insight. Having worked her way through his writings and six major biographies, she then read six letters from Eileen to her best friend Norah Symes written over a number of years, starting soon after her marriage in 1936. Funder was shocked by what she found and her book is partly an attempt to create a counter-narrative of Eileen’s story and partly a feminist treatise on how men often diminish, omit or erase women from history.

Eileen’s letters were discovered after these key biographies had been written. Funder quotes extensively from Orwell himself, his biographers, and Eileen’s letters, to make her point that, “the whole world was set up to allow men to treat women badly, and still think of themselves as decent people.” The letters to Norah cover her marriage, her time with Orwell in Spain during the civil war, their time in Morocco while he was convalescing from TB, and their time in London during the blitz. Eileen was a great letter writer, a talented and witty woman, who won a scholarship to Oxford to read English in the 1920s, had a career of her own, as well as supporting and possibly inspiring Orwell’s. But her work is “barely acknowledged” by both Orwell and his male biographers.

Her letters document how, in the early days of the marriage, they seem to quarrel “continuously” and “very bitterly,” and she wonders if she should save time and write one letter to everyone when it ended in “murder or separation”. By contrast, there seems to be some consensus from his biographers that this was a very happy time for Orwell, in which there was a “transformation” in his writing. Funder explores the influence Eileen may have had on this. She points out it was Eileen who suggested making Animal Farm a fable. Eileen also wrote a poem called, End of the Century, 1984, some elements of which foreshadow elements of Orwell’s dystopian novel. Interestingly, during WWII, she also worked in the Censorship Department of the Ministry of Information.

Funder asks the question, ‘What did she give and what did it cost her?’ She says women are often “doubted, trivialised or reduced to footnotes in 8-point font.”

Funder has studied the footnotes. And where the male biographers see an open marriage in which Eileen was complicit, Funder sees Orwell as someone who was not ‘decent’ in the way he treated her or women in general. We cannot know exactly what Eileen suffered or what she chose to go along with or even instigate. On the other hand, her tragic early death and how it came about tells us something of her lack of power at the time. And 80 years later, it is hard to argue against Funder when she says that “Patriarchy is a fiction in which all the main characters are male and the world is seen from their point of view.”