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Mazz@1984 · @CaringKinderSociety

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Sydney Morning Herald
JULY 1, 2023

One of Western literature’s most famous 20th-century writers, Orwell is best known for his two mega-hits, Animal Farm and 1984. Funder had always loved him for what she calls “his laser vision about how power works, and who it works on”. Not just political power, but power relations between people. Reflecting on why he took part in the Spanish Civil War, Orwell wrote in Homage to Catalonia that he was fighting for “common decency”: truth and integrity between one person and another.

Funder also read about Orwell – the many, many biographies and commentaries of the past 50-odd years. As she did so, she found herself searching for Orwell’s wife. She was sensitised to wives and women’s work, perhaps. Eileen O’Shaughnessy married Orwell in 1936 and became Eileen Blair (George Orwell’s real name was, rather prosaically, Eric Blair). But she was virtually missing from Orwell’s own, often deeply personal, writing about his life. This was odd, Funder thought – especially since, as she dug deeper, she discovered a woman who was, according to seemingly everyone who knew her, a truly remarkable person.

Wifedom is the result of this digging. Eileen Blair was a woman who won a scholarship to and earned an English degree from the University of Oxford, at a time when women were barely admitted to higher education. (Orwell himself was not “recommended” by his school for university, and did not attend.)

A woman who published, in 1934, a dystopian poem called, significantly, End of the Century, 1984; who asked for the word “obey” to be removed from her wedding vows, and twice organised co-workers to stand up to bullying bosses in male-dominated workplaces. She was a woman who not only performed every skerrick of the domestic work in her life with Orwell, but also supported him financially for at least two years of their nine-year marriage; who saved one of his manuscripts from destruction in the Spanish Civil War, and was a crucial literary influence in his life. Eileen was the first reader – not to mention typist, rewriter, editor and political educator – of Orwell’s work. She was, Funder argues convincingly, especially important to the creation of Animal Farm and 1984.

How could Orwell have virtually erased her from accounts of his life? How could the man who wrote “in a time of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act” have failed to tell the truth about his own wife? But equally unsettling was the fact that Eileen was also missing from almost all the biographical writing on Orwell.

https://www.smh.com.au/national/a-woman-s-work-why-the-story-of-george-orwell-s-forgotten-first-wife-still-matters-20230529-p5dc3y.html

#eileenblair #orwell

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