“Wifedom” by Anna Funder: the invisible woman in George Orwell’s life
The invisible woman in biographies of famous men
I loved ‘Wifedom’ by Anna Funder. Her painstaking research about Eileen O’Shaughnessy, George Orwell’s first wife, astonished me with the intricate details of Eileen’s life. How did so many male Orwell biographers not find this same evidence? And how did Anna Funder find it when so many others missed it? I’d love to know.
When I researched Eileen via Google and while reading several media articles, I was furious at how Eileen was portrayed. Did she and Orwell really have an open marriage? Or did Eileen just put up with Orwell’s philandering? And did Eileen have an affair with her colleague in Barcelona, or are those claims made by male biographers and journalists speculating? I’m eager to know.
‘Wifedom’ reminds me of Claire Tomalin’s ‘The Invisible Woman’, the biography of Ellen Ternan, Charles Darwins’ secret lover of 13 years.
T.S Eliot’s invisible woman
It also reminds me of Lyndall Gordon’s ‘The Hyacinth Girl’, about T.S Eliot’s secret love and muse, Emily Hale. .
A few weeks ago when I was a visiting scholar at Oxford’s Centre for Life Writing, I took part in a small-group workshop with Hermione Lee on the boundaries between fact and fiction in biography. Hermione introduced me to Lyndall Gordon, who sat next to me.
Lyndall told me T.S Eliot had destroyed all his letters to the love of his life, Emily Hale, but Emily donated his over 1,100 letters to her to Princeton. In 2019 when the lock was removed from the box containing these letters, Lyndall was one of only a few researchers allowed to read them.
In her biography of Eliot in 1998, Lyndall speculated about his relationship with Emily, but after reading his letters, she embarked on writing ‘The Hyacinth Girl’ and showed how Emily inspired so much of Eliot’s poetry, especially ‘The Wasteland’, in which Emily is the Hyacinth Girl.
How many other biographies of the invisible woman in prominent men’s lives are waiting to be written? I’m sure we have a treasure trove of them. Let’s get started!
