Human rights lawyer-turned novelist Anna Funder’s 2023 release Wifedom investigates one wife’s unseen literary impact — Eileen O’Shaughnessy — as a symbol of the unspoken and systematic expectations of labour placed on women in relationships.
What brought Funder to writing novels, particularly the genre-bending work that is Wifedom? Funder, who was born in Melbourne, has jetted across the world, living in San Francisco, Paris, West Berlin, New York and settling now in Sydney’s neighbourly inner-west. She notes that her upbringing in Paris may have nurtured her language obsession: “I have always known that the English language is just one tool of communication, and not the only way to say things. [Learning French] made me more confident about stretching the English language”.
She also attributes some of her confidence and conviction to her law degree and work in human rights law. Funder recalls how, as a self-described “shy” young woman, her law degree was “part of her armoury” which helped repel intimidation efforts from German spies. Her work in law dovetails with an ardent passion for social justice. This “social justice bent”, she describes, informs her excitement in “telling stories that haven’t been told”, specifically David and Goliath-type dynamics which involve a “small” figure confronting looming, majoritarian power structures. Funder sees herself as “bearing witness and doing justice” to this trope as it plays out in real-life in the case of Eileen, George Orwell’s first wife.
And as Funder dug deeper into the lauded and laureated Orwell, and his mistreatment of his wife and other women, she realised she was bearing witness to more than she expected. Not only did she uncover Orwell’s crimes, such as unattributed theft of his wife’s ideas and adulterous, lecherous and sexually-violent behaviour, but Funder was shocked to encounter such a contemporary refusal to shine a light on Orwell’s true character.
She notes, “Two of the most recent biographies on Orwell do not find Eileen’s life remarkable; they resist ascribing any of Orwell’s writing or success to Eileen”. This is despite clear evidence that Orwell’s literary output has Eileen’s mind written all over it — his contemporaries noted after the couple moved in together that Orwell’s literary skills ‘inexplicably’ improved, failing to recognise that Eileen studied English Literature at Oxford.
Biographical omissions about Eileen’s undeniable impact on Orwell’s intellectual development — as well as Orwell’s mother and aunt who were notable suffragettes and vocal feminists — reflect as much about contemporary society as Orwell’s world. “It is one of the ways patriarchy reproduces itself”, Funder explains. Faced with narratives populated by gaps, omissions and distortions, Funder set to pen a “fiction of inclusion”, dismantling the myth of Orwell as a decent, honest, and importantly, self-made man.
In Wifedom, Funder experiments with form and voice with this confident prestidigitation to parallel Eileen’s shadowed story with that of her own, and women at large. Funder draws parallels between Eileen’s reconstituted narrative and Funder’s own anecdotes on wifedom in the 21st century.
This is well justified at one point in the novel when she writes, “Things in the rear view mirror are closer than they appear”. We look into the rear view mirror to ensure that vehicles of the past are not hurtling toward us, ready to crash if we do not accelerate into the future or change lanes into a new way of living. For Funder, when she looks back at Eileen’s life, she views a woman who has to perform the work involved with being “a good woman, person, wife and mother”, such that her labour is definitional, and constitutive of femininity. “The patriarchy is founded on labour theft”, Funder explains. But this is a practice that did not die in Orwell’s era, and requires modern reckonings. Funder references how society is currently unpacking the gender binary, a process by which “we make this unseen labour more visible”.
Funder’s blend of fiction and fact in the compendium that is Wifedom speaks to the importance of both powers in dismantling bastions such as the patriarchy. Though Funder has written both non-fiction and fiction works in the past, when selecting form she asks herself, “how do I best serve this material?”. To honour Eileen, and rectify the glaring omissions in the many hagiographies of George Orwell, fiction must illuminate fact. Funder lists some facts which draw attention to sexism as rampant and widespread: for example, a United Nations report estimates that if the unpaid work of women had to be paid for, it would cost 10.9 trillion USD each year. While these statistics are damning and shock us, fiction can intervene to work alongside fact and ensure these truths really land. Funder reminds us, “we are emotional, not rational creatures. In order to truly understand something, you have to understand it emotionally.” Here, fiction is a powerful and critical force in toying with our emotions and conveying the human experience.
As for Funder’s next steps, she will be writing a novel that is currently coalescing in her mind. She describes herself as “dancing around the edges of an idea”. We are on the edge of our seats waiting to see the show.
This interview took place as part of the Mark and Evette Nib Literary Prize, of which Anna Funder was a nominee for Wifedom. The Prize was announced on November 27.
