Wifedom by Anna Funder, Hamish Hamilton
That Anna Funder’s hybrid fact/fiction/memoir is impossible to categorise is just one of the ways in which the Australian author breaks exciting new ground in her extraordinary new book. Ostensibly, it’s an investigation into the woman behind the work of literary giant George Orwell. If you didn’t realise there was one, read on …
Exasperated and weighed down with domestic duties during the pandemic lockdown, Funder, an award-winning author herself, is unable to write. Seeking inspiration, she embarks on a re-reading of her favourite author Orwell – he of 1984 and Animal Farm fame – and becomes transfixed by Orwell’s first wife, or rather the lack of her. This sends her scurrying down a rabbit hole.
What unfolds is part biography, part memoir, part detective story, part feminist musing on the frustrations of a woman’s role, part observation of her own teenage daughters as #MeToo erupts; and with all this bubbling under the surface the narrative hops between the lives of Orwell in the 1930s with his seemingly invisible spouse, and Anna Funder’s own contemporary experiences. It sounds confounding but prepare to be enthralled, and also entertained, by an elegantly drawn humorous tone that pulls us in, complicit in Funder’s journey.
Eileen O’Shaughnessy was a very smart woman –
