Wifedom

byAnna Funder, Arianwen Parkes-Lockwood (Read by), Jane Slavin (Read by)

Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life

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Eileen Orwell is a woman elided from history. The first of George Orwell's wives, her existence has been ignored by all of his six - male - biographers. It's hard for history to find you when you have been written out of the narrative. But if you read like a woman, you see other things. In researching a new book on Orwell, Anna Funder unearthed the existence of a person whose discomforting and humiliating work to create the conditions that allowed Orwell to write had been erased. It is as if, half a century after his death, a screen concealing Orwell's private life has been rolled up, revealing the woman who lived behind it.

Eileen's story, gleaned from the minimising losses of Orwell's biographers, holds staggering parallels with the lives of working women now, all these decades later. Wifedom is a revelatory book that speaks to the unsung work of women today, creating the conditions of artistic production for men while suppressing their own genius, all of which is considered as natural - and as little in need of acknowledgement or thanks - as breathing.
A marvelous book . . . I just loved it all, and have a permanently marked-up, dog-eared copy on my shelf for the next generation.
Tom Hanks

About Anna Funder

Anna Funder is the author of the international bestsellers Stasiland and All That I Am. In 2004 Stasiland won the Samuel Johnson Prize and, along with All That I Am, has been published in twenty-six countries. All That I Am won the Miles Franklin Award, and was a finalist for the International IMPAC Dublin Award and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. It was also chosen as a BBC Book of the Week and Book at Bedtime.

Anna was originally trained as an international human rights lawyer. She lives in Sydney.
Details
  • Imprint: Viking
  • ISBN: 9780241556788
  • Length: 760 minutes
  • Price: £13.00
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