The goal of biography is shifting. Though society at large remains fascinated by the lives of superheroes and other phenomenal individuals, the mythology of exceptionalism perpetuated through the very genre of biography is showing signs of wear. If nothing else has made it clear, the climate crisis affirms the fact that no one person can save us all.
By and large, traditional biographies validate individualism. While this used to be a prized trait, it hasn’t served society very well. For better or worse, the genre may forever inherently celebrate lone wolves — this month, Walter Isaacson adds Elon Musk to his oeuvre of “geniuses” — but the field is evolving. One example: Anna Funder’s “Wifedom: Mrs. Orwell’s Invisible Life” is not simply a biography of George Orwell and his wife, Eileen (née O’Shaughnssey).It’s in many ways a counterfiction, a phrase that Funder herself employs.
“Wifedom” is a book that dares to imagine lives beyond social conscription — for its author and its subjects. At a professional and personal breaking point, Funder stumbles upon a copy of Orwell’s collected essays in a secondhand bookshop, prompting her to read the six major biographies of Orwell. In recent years, Orwell has stepped back into a familiar place in our consciousness. His novels (”1984″ and “Animal Farm”) and essays give us a shorthand language and points of reference for much of the political nightmare of the last seven or more years. Her inflamed fascination is genuine.
However, in her fervor over Orwell, Funder discovers an ugly and misogynistic passage in Orwell’s personal notebook (excerpted in biographies) that brings this headlong fascination to a halt. Funder reflects, “He sees women — as wives — in terms of what they do for him or ‘demand’ of him. Not enough cleaning; too much sex. How was it then for her? My first guess: too much cleaning and not enough, or not good enough, sex.” Succinct though this may be, this recognition prompts Funder to turn the tables on the great author. Is Orwell speaking about all women or is this vile rant inspired by his wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy? Who was O’Shaughnessy, what was her history, and why hadn’t Funder read more about her? Suddenly, Funder shifts her attention: “Looking for Eileen involved the pleasure of reading Orwell on how power works. Finding her held the possibility of revealing how it works on women: how a woman can be buried first by domesticity and then by history.” It’s in these gaps that Funder will uncover a larger perspective on the great manand perhaps even his influence today.
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On her archival journey, Funder admits there isn’t much to be found through Orwell’s biographies. However, many of Orwell’s and O’Shaughnessy’s friends and contemporaries lived long lives, leaving behind interviews, memoirs, and letters. What’s of greatest importance are six letters written by O’Shaughnessy to her best friend Norah Symes Myles during Eileen’s marriage to Orwell, discovered in 2005. Though she admirably offers scholarly analysis, writing a fascinating biography of the Orwells as well as a portrait of British literary and political life between the wars and beyond, Funder also uses these letters as a means to fill the gaps of O’Shaughnessy’s missing biography by writing fictional scenes inspired by the letters and her research. These passages illuminate the story of this marriage and the work that was created during its brief tenure.
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O’Shaughnessy was more than a wife. She was Orwell’s intellectual partner as much as his domestic savior and greatest financial supporter. She also endured physical and emotional hardship; following him to Spain during the Spanish Civil War, to Morocco for his period of physical recovery, to the British countryside where he wanted to live out his pastoral dream, endangering the health of them both through manual labor and his emotional and sexual infidelities. “Wifedom” is a chilling and spellbinding revisionist history about one of the 20th-century’s most imposing authors.It could not exist without such a nimble and generous imagination.
So, here lies the book’s leap of faith. Are you a purist who believes that biography must never include conjecture much less imagined histories? Or do you think it’s more important to juxtapose a canonical life with the possibility of what could have been? In the past, writers may have opted to write historical fiction drawn from scant archival material. These books never enjoyed the respect that nonfiction possesses. Hence, in recent years, scholars and writers have chosen to center creative work within nonfiction. Columbia University historian Sadiya Hartman’s 2019 “Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Stories of Upheaval” “elaborates, augments transposes, and breaks open archival documents so they might yield a richer picture of the social upheaval that transformed black social life in the twentieth century. The goal is to understand and experience the world as these young women did, to learn from what they know.”
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In a similar vein, Funder imagines a domestic and intimate life for O’Shaughnessy. In some spaces, she uses it to speak to the larger questions her book hopes to answer. In her fictional voice as O’Shaughnessy, she conjures this reflection: “Everything she is and does and knows seems to be his for the taking. There are not really words for this that she can find. She stares at the pages of his book, her scrawl all over the margins. She’s in this story only in a way no one will ever see. … She has typed herself out of the story.” Funder may read as indulgent to some, but her claims ask: Has history ignored a collaboration between husband and wife which created some of the boldest political literature of the 20th century? While there are those who may clutch their pearls at such liberties, how else but through a brilliant imagination will we come to know long buried truths?
WIFEDOM: Mrs. Orwell’s Invisible Life
By Anna Funder
Alfred A. Knopf, 432 pages, $32
Lauren LeBlanc is a board member of the National Book Critics Circle. Her Substack newsletter is https://laurenleblanc.substack.com/.