George Orwell's invisible wife.

 

I've just finished reading the book 'Wifedom: Mrs. Orwell's Invisible Life' by Anna Funder. This book contains some useful information about both Orwell and Eileen Blair but it's written from a feminist perspective.

Anna Funder observes that throughout his life Eric Blair relied on women to help him out and they did so. They brought him up, provided financial help and accommodation, and provided contacts to literary agents and publishers. However, Funder argues that Eric Blair treated women badly, including his wife Eileen, who was little more than skivvy for him.

Although Orwell, gave instructions that he didn't want biographies to be written about him, there have been a number of biographies written about him since his death in January 1950. Funder quite rightly points out that many of the biographer’s erase and obscure facts about the women in George Orwell's life and Orwell does the same.

In Homage to Catalonia, Orwell's refers to his 'wife' but he doesn't say anything about her or what she was doing in Spain. Anna Funder says: "I had read Homage twice and never registered that Eileen was in Spain. No one I ever asked remembers her. How can you read a book and have no memory that a person was not in a place alone, but with their spouse? Orwell seems to have written her out of the story himself."

What Eileen Blair made of being erased and forgotten and plunged down the memory hole, we will never know, because she's not here to tell us and nor is it mentioned in her letters. Funder says of Eileen, “At no point in her life does Eileen seem to have felt she deserved more than she got.” She adds, “Wifedom is a wicked trick we have learned to play ourselves.”

When Orwell got shot through the neck on the Aragon front, one of the stretcher bearers reported Orwell saying, "Please tell Eileen that I love her", but this isn't mentioned in Homage to Catalonia. It might well be that this omission, simply reflects English stoicism and a hesitance to display feeling. Yet, Orwell's publisher Fred Warburg, said: "He (Orwell), was as secretive about his private life as any man that I ever knew."

People who knew Eileen Blair describe her as 'sophisticated', 'fastidious', 'highly intelligent', and 'intellectual'. Apparently, she didn't suffer fools and didn't spare anyone. By all accounts, she could give you a good tongue lashing. Neither Eric or Eileen were in good health but it didn't stop him from pursuing other women. Orwell hardly ever told anyone that he had TB.

Funder seems obsessed with Orwell's sex life or lack of it. While we're told about Orwell's extra marital relationships, his frequenting of brothels in Paris, Burma, and Morocco, and attempted sexual assaults that Orwell allegedly made on a number of women, Funder also thinks that he might have been a repressed homosexual. She writes: "Numerous friends of Orwell thought his virulent homophobia odd. No biographer deals plainly with the possibility of Orwell's homosexuality."

Funder thinks that Orwell possibly inhabited a world where "desire and disgust mingle." Personally, the best of the book are the sections on Burma and Spain. Orwell served as a colonial policeman in Burma and grew to despise the British Empire and British colonialism. His first novel was called ‘Burmese Days’ and he wrote: “You see louts fresh from school kicking grey-haired servants.” Orwell admitted to kicking his own servant, a houseboy, who he’d taught to wake him by tickling his feet. Funder says that when the governor’s wife in Burma campaigned for British men to marry their concubines or stop sleeping with them, the response was “no cunt no oil.”

As both Eileen and George Orwell were working with the Marxist POUM, they were constantly spied on by Communist agents who had infiltrated the POUM and their lives. English men like David Wickes and David Crook, who were reporting to Alexander Orlov, Stalin's man in Spain, who was quietly compiling a kill list. Both Eileen and Orwell had to get out of Spain in a hurry to avoid being liquidated by Stalin's goons.