Barnhill, Jura — John Perivolaris, Flickr creative commons
Barnhill is where Orwell wrote '1984'
Anna Funder dug around and into the past lives of Eric Blair and Eileen O'Shaughnessy (Mr and Mrs George Orwell) and found what she was looking for to support her working thesis: that patriarchy shamelessly erases women. (Is that a revelation?)
Wifedom is not a compassionate book, in that it does not seem to grasp the reality of people's lives. The author seems to suffer a delusional complacency in not understanding that all human beings are flawed.
But somehow we manage to love each other and work together and sometimes out of that something of value comes into the world.
Both Eric and Eileen seriously neglected their own health and consequently both died young. Eileen was not a victim. She had agency. She went to Spain during the civil war against Eric's wishes.
She wrote a poem titled '1984' but there is a huge gap between that and writing a book. She inspired and worked with Eric on 'Animal Farm'. She typed and edited his work; he was a better writer because of her. She worked indefatigably and heroically and made so much possible for him that he could not have achieved otherwise.
But they both failed themselves and each other, as humans do. Eileen wrote letters to friends expecting them to read between the lines. She seems to have understood that she may well not survive her surgery, but she wrote to Eric saying how the medical staff praised her for being so good about everything, that is, accepting their lack of due care. Her husband did not make her be like that, as with all of us, there was a saboteur within.
We are all complex creatures, heavily conditioned by the society we are born into, struggling with our own inner conflicts and deficiencies and aberrations. This is human life.
If we expect anything otherwise we create atrocities.
George Orwell wrote '1984' after the death of Eileen. He took himself off to the remote island of Jura to do so. It was a feat of extraordinary endurance.
For Funder to use letters (are letters 'truth' documents?) and personal accounts of past events (memories are not reliable) to cast George as the demon and Eileen as the angel is unfair to their legacy, and that is what she seems to have done.
'1984' was written because of what Orwell was seeing and experiencing at the time. It isn't a prophecy of the future but a dramatised account of how things were at the time, and continue to be.
He wrote in his essay 'Notes on Nationalism' that we need to make 'a moral effort' against all our emotional 'nationalisms' and the way in which we try to push contradictory reality into one orthodoxy.
He was not a perfect man. Eileen was not a perfect woman. Together they created a body of work that remains highly relevant.
If we do not learn to stop trying to force our own conceit upon one another, all their work will have been for nothing.
