The invisible woman

George Orwell's first wife has been ill-served by his own biographers, yet here the witty and fierce Eileen is stripped of agency all over again

- Olivia Laing

'It can't have been fun for the Buddha's wife, Left on her own for the rest of her life." Ruth Silcock's poem bemoans the fate of the wives of Great Men, sidelined or neglected while their busy husbands are exalted. By the 1990s, the idea that the role of wife represented an aspect of patriarchal oppression was uncontroversial.

In 2017, the writer Anna Funder, best known for Stasiland, found herself cognisant for the first time that she as a wife had taken up the lion's share of parenting and housework. She turned to George Orwell for insight into her oppression, only to discover lurking in the shadows the emblematic figure of his wife, Eileen, whose story she seizes on as a way of exorcising her feelings.

Eileen O'Shaughnessy was a clever, Oxford-educated, independent-minded girl from a comfortable background. She encountered Orwell at a party in 1935 and was so charmed by this tall, ungainly, moth-eaten man that when he proposed at their next meeting she said yes. They set up shop, literally, in a primitive cottage in rural Hertfordshire, where it rapidly became apparent that Eileen was expected to serve as editor, cook, shopkeeper, hen wrangler, cesspit swiller and devoted nurse (Orwell was plagued by chest infections, as yet undiagnosed as the tuberculosis that would kill him).