What happens to all those women behind the celebrated literary men we hear about, who helped and sustained them along the way only to be discarded or abandoned—or simply written out of the record? It is a question that probably haunts every woman who reads or writes, reminding her of the precarious position she and her kind occupy in any account of talent or accomplishment. In her essay “Shakespeare’s Sister,” Virginia Woolf mused over the question of female talent and concluded that if the bard had in fact had “a wonderfully gifted sister,” she would have ended up committing suicide.
Now Anna Funder’s wonderful, genre-bending book Wifedom comes to the rescue, salvaging the life of one such overlooked woman: Eileen O’Shaughnessy, the first wife of George Orwell, and the only one he lived with. (We have heard so much about Orwell’s second wife, Sonia, who married him virtually on his deathbed and thus managed to make herself a key player in shaping his posthumous reputation, that it is easy to forget that anyone preceded her.)
