Genius writer, cruel husband: why we can never look at George Orwell the same way again

The afterlife of Eric Blair, aka George Orwell, the “wintry conscience” of his century, is almost as remarkable as our obsession with his masterpiece, Nineteen Eighty-Four. It was then, as an overburdened wife, that Funder began to analyse the troubling, sad story of the first Mrs Orwell, Eileen O’Shaughnessy, the shadowy figure who signed herself “Pig”. Funder freely admits that “the unseen work of a great writer’s life fascinates me”, and worries that to think like a writer is “to think like a man”. In a brilliant display of literary reverse-engineering, she deconstructs Mr and Mrs Orwell’s Spanish Civil War, described in Homage to Catalonia, and analyses the shocking degree to which he wrote ”my wife” both into, and out of, his story, airbrushing a tale of courage and character in which Eileen was centre-stage among the anti-fascists at the Continental hotel in Barcelona, while her husband, blundering around the front, was an awkward, and unknown, would-be writer, and possibly confused Old Etonian homosexual. More polemical, many passages of Wifedom describe the slow transformation of this marriage into Eileen’s subordination to the “famous writer” in which she, in a tormented act of devotion, gave Orwell a double life: one to depart from, another to come back to.