Anna Funder on the ‘beautiful letters’ she received from men who read Wifedom

“Celia told Sir Bernard Crick, one of Orwell’s biographers, that she and Orwell had been lovers. And then six weeks later, she wrote to him to say, ‘I might have given you the impression that we have been lovers. Although that would have been a very interesting experience, and I would have liked to have had it, I didn’t.’ So he went back to his notes where he had written that they were lovers and wrote in handwriting – or his secretary did – that she later denied it,” Funder says.

“I have put in the end note exactly what I’ve just told you. So [Celia] tells the biographer and then she takes it back. I understand the sensitivity, but it was a long time ago, they were single people, there was no coercion.”

In Wifedom, Funder points out that many biographers ignored or minimised Eileen’s contribution to Orwell’s work; she argues his writing is strongly influenced by her. It was her idea to write Animal Farm as a parable.

Several historical critics observed his writing changed dramatically from 1936, the year they married, but not why. A biography published in 2000 by Sylvia Topp, Eileen: The Making Of George Orwell, makes a similar case.

Funder has come under fire for painting a negative picture of Orwell as a person. The author of Stasiland and Miles Franklin-winner All That I Am argues his work suggests something of Orwell’s nature.

“To have a vision as sadistic, paranoid, grim and misogynist as that in 1984, which comes as a salutary warning, generation after generation, about dictatorships, that’s coming from deep inside a man who understands those things. Or is those things,” she says.

It’s important to tell the full story, Funder says. “If you have a more accurate, less whitewashed view of his character, his relationship to his work is much more interesting. I don’t think we need to live in a world which gives us writers as fictional versions of themselves … it’s not interesting, and it’s not real.“

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Bringing Eileen O’Shaughnessy to life highlights the fact women are often written out of history. Orwell was brought up by political, intellectual women – his feminist mother and aunt, who were also Fabians, says Funder, but that does not rate a mention in books about the famous author. “So for a writer who grows up to have an underdog sense of himself and to be left wing, that is his enormously important intellectual and political inheritance,” she says. “But it seems to be too difficult for biographers to say that.”