When Anna Funder returned to the work of her literary hero George Orwell looking for escape and inspiration, she began re-reading his books and biographies. Anna Funder uncovered his forgotten wife – and it’s a revelation. Eileen O’Shaughnessy’s literary brilliance shaped Orwell’s work and her practical nous saved his life. But why – and how – was she absent from the story? Using newly discovered letters from Eileen to her best friend, Funder recreates the Orwells’ marriage. A marriage that lasted through the Spanish Civil War and WW II in London. As she rolls up the screen concealing Orwell’s private life she is led to question what it takes to be a writer, and what it is to be a wife.
In this episode Gregory Dobbs chats to Anna Funder about writing a ‘counter-fiction’ to those presented by George Orwell’s earlier biographers and their ‘fiction of omission’ and why Orwell the artist and Orwell the man may be entirely different.
