George Orwell and Women

Wifedom, Deborah Levy, why we write

Hello!

On March 29, 1945, Eileen Blair died at age 39 because her heart stopped during a hysterectomy. Eileen (born O’Shaughnessy) had suffered from uterine bleeding for many years. A doctor in London recommended that she have blood transfusions before the operation, but she was worried about the cost of a hospital stay so she opted for a less expensive operation. A report at the inquest noted that she was in a “very anaemic condition.”

You may not have heard of Eileen, but you’ve almost certainly heard of her husband, George Orwell. Eileen has been on my mind because I recently read Wifedom: Mrs. Orwell’s Invisible Life by Australian novelist Anna Funder.

According to Funder, Eileen deserves partial credit for Animal Farm, Orwell’s allegory about Stalinist Russia. Orwell wanted to write a critical essay about Stalin. Eileen, who had worked for the Censorship Department of the British Ministry of Information during WWII—and who had studied children’s literature and fables at Oxford—convinced her husband to write a novel instead. The couple worked on Animal Farm together in the evenings. As Funder says in this interview: "Animal Farm is an outlier in all of Orwell's works. All his other works have a stand-in Orwell underdog figure … and Animal Farm has a group of characters, including female characters who are really well drawn. It's an ensemble piece; it's funny and witty and whimsical in ways that she absolutely was.”

Eileen was also there when Orwell fought the Fascists in the Spanish Civil War, an experience that he wrote about in Homage to Catalonia. While Orwell was in the trenches, so bored that he once literally shot himself in the foot (aiming at a rat in the vicinity), Eileen was in Barcelona, organizing British volunteers and typing Orwell’s drafts. When the political situation became too dangerous for the couple to stay, Eileen organized their departure.

Funder works backwards through Homage to Catalonia, biographies of Orwell, and various witness accounts in order to write Eileen back into the story.

“Eileen got them both out of Spain by fronting up to the same police prefecture those men had probably been sent from, to get the visas they needed to leave. One biographer eliminates her with the passive voice, writing: 'By now, thanks to the British consulate, their passports were in order.' In Homage, Orwell mentions 'my wife' 37 times but never once names her. No character can come to life without a name. But from a wife, which is a job description, all can be stolen. I wondered what she felt as she typed those pages.”

I love George Orwell’s essays. As a lawyer, I reread Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language” from time to time to remind me why it’s important to write clearly about the law. I was heartbroken to read that Orwell and his biographers employed a lack of specificity and passivity to erase Eileen’s contributions.

British author Deborah Levy also has a special feeling for George Orwell. In Things I Don’t Want to Know: On Writing, the first volume in Levy’s “living autobiography,” she responds to Orwell’s “Why I Write,” taking on each of Orwell’s “four great motives” for writing prose, but through a feminist lens.

Orwell’s motives are: (1) sheer egoism; (2) aesthetic enthusiasm; (3) historical impulse; and (4) political purpose. In Levy’s chapter on “sheer egoism,” she writes about when she was 15, an aspiring writer, and her mother tasked her with cleaning the family’s washing machine after a messy incident involving a broken jar of honey: “While I was on my hands and knees, hands stuck inside the washing machine, it occurred to me that this is how suicidal women poets end their life, except they stuck their head into a gas oven.”

I am familiar with this problem. One minute I’m thinking about my writing ambitions, and the next minute I’m thinking about Sylvia Plath. I used to try not to have these thoughts. But then I read Heather Clark’s life-changing biography, Red Comet: the Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath. Now I love thinking about Sylvia Plath. This does not mean I’m suicidal. It means I’m intrigued by the intersection of art and motherhood, and I choose not to accept the warning that my brain is serving me with these images of poets’ heads in gas ovens: that ambition will kill me or make me insane.

One day, I sat down to write an essay inspired by Levy and Orwell’s essays on writing. I was only a few sentences into “sheer egoism” when my hand drifted up to my face. I absentmindedly sniffed my thumb and could not help noticing that it smelled like shit. My mind racing in a logical fashion, I concluded that the sticky brown smudge I had stepped on in the laundry room and wiped off my foot with a damp washcloth earlier, apparently not effectively enough, was not chocolate, as I had hoped, but a piece of shit. (We will never know whether it came from my family’s dirty laundry or the cat’s litter box in the corner of the laundry room. I have my suspicions.)

I jumped up, washed my hands with soap and water, and scrubbed the laundry room floor with a paper towel and cleaning spray. Much later, when I sat back down to a blank Word document, I thought I might as well title my essay, “Why I Don’t Write.”

To be clear, I am not comparing myself to Eileen Blair, who once cleaned out a malfunctioning privy by herself. Funder writes the scene in memorable, novelistic fashion: Eileen in Wellies, up to her elbows in shit, Orwell emerging from the house and asking if she thought it might be time for tea.

Fortunately for me, my husband is a wizard with the plunger. He also knows how to cook, clean, and type. My wifedom is in no way similar to Eileen’s. But reading Funder’s book, I noticed again that the reasons I don’t write are almost always related to my domestic role.

Sometimes I think I’m the problem. I started working full-time when I was 17, after graduating high school early. I worked throughout college. With a few exceptions for education, I worked full-time for over twenty years, until two years ago, when I quit practicing law to write.

After decades of working and getting paid, it was hard for me to channel half of my workweek energy into the solitary, mostly unpaid work of writing. A vacuum appeared, and into this space flowed a deeply ingrained, culturally learned sense of wifely and maternal duty. I fill up my schedule with volunteering, I sweep the floors and do the laundry and move random bits of plastic around the house. I drive kids around. I clean shit off the floor. It doesn’t seem like any of these tasks take up too much time on their own, but cumulatively they add up to many hours in the week during which I am an overeducated, underpaid housekeeper, cook, and chauffeur.

Sometimes I think I’m not the problem; the problem is motherhood in late-stage capitalist America. (See also: The purpose of a system is what it does.)

In Wifedom, Funder discusses at length the idea that domesticity is a distraction to the great male writer, an old-fashioned yet persistent bugaboo that lives in tension with the reality that many of these so-called great men lacked the basic life skills to see to their own wellbeing. This is an idea best summed up by Orwell frenemy Cyril Connolly, who once famously quipped: “There is no more somber enemy of good art than the pram in the hall.”

Contrast the “pram in the hall” with the “baby on the fire escape,” a phrase from a story told about the painter Alice Notley, whose in-laws accused her of neglecting her child while she worked. I came across this story in The Baby on the Fire Escape: Creativity, Motherhood, and the Mind-Baby Problem, in which Julie Phillips turns the idea of domesticity as distraction on its head. For many women artists, Phillips argues, the way to art is not around the hassle, drudgery, joy, and tedium of making a home. The way to making art is through.

Consider a day in the life of Shirley Jackson, author of “The Lottery,” The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle:

“I am a writer who, due to a series of innocent and ignorant faults of judgment, finds herself with a family of four children and a husband, an eighteen-room house and no help, and two Great Danes and four cats, and—if he has survived this long—a hamster. There may also be a goldfish somewhere. Anyway, what this means is that I have at most a few hours a day to spend at the typewriter, and about sixteen—assuming that I indulge myself with a few hours of sleep—to spend wondering what to have for dinner tonight that we didn’t have last night, and letting the dogs in and letting the dogs out, and trying to get the living room looking decent without actually cleaning it, and driving children to dance class and French lessons and record dances and movies and horseback riding lessons and off to town to buy a Ricky Nelson record, and then back into town to exchange it for Fats Domino, and over to a friend’s house to play the record, and then off to buy new dancing shoes. . . .”

Take out the records and sub Hebrew school for French lessons, and you’re not far off from my typical schedule.

But here’s the beauty of Shirley Jackson (which also turns out to the whole point of The Baby on the Fire Escape): all those distractions from writing are not just distractions. Out of necessity, they become part of her process.

“All the time that I am making beds and doing dishes and driving to town for dancing shoes, I am telling myself stories. Stories about anything, anything at all. Just stories. After all, who can vacuum a room and concentrate on it? I tell myself stories. I have a whopper of a story about the laundry basket that I can’t tell now, and stories about the missing socks, and stories about the kitchen appliances and the wastebaskets and the bushes on the road to the school, and just about everything. They keep me working, my stories. I may never write down the laundry basket—as a matter of fact, I’m pretty sure I won’t—but as long as I know there’s a story there I can go on sorting laundry.”

Reading Wifedom and The Baby on the Fire Escape and Shirley Jackson’s essays is both empowering and sad. I want to believe that folding laundry is part of my creative process. On good days, I can get behind this idea. On other days, I’m angry that my struggles in 2024 sound so similar to Shirley Jackson’s in the 1950s. And I’m furious that funny, brilliant, kind Eileen O’Shaughnessy Blair died during discount surgery, so diminished that she didn’t feel worthy of more appropriate medical care.

Speaking of why we write . . .

Last week, poet Maggie Smith’s For Dear Life newsletter was a response to a reader who asked, “Why write an emotional memoir?” Most of Smith’s response consisted of circular reasoning: I write because I’m a writer. No one asks a professional baker why she sells her bread, right? Writing is her job.

This was, of course, a perfectly adequate answer. I applaud Smith for writing You Could Make This Beautiful, a memoir about her marriage and divorce, because she fucking wanted to and there was an audience for it. Smith should not have to defend her choice to write for a living. But what if she didn’t defend? What if she used the question as a springboard to examine every facet of her motivation to write?

As I read and mulled over Smith’s words, I found my mind returning to Orwell’s “four great motives.” I would like to read more women writing about how historical impulse, political purpose, aesthetic enthusiasm and sheer egoism inform their work.

George Orwell, the great hater of tyranny, apparently had a pretty big blind spot when it came to his wife. What better response than a woman writing about marriage and divorce with the clarity of language that Orwell prescribed? Maybe we will know that we’re really free to write like a man when the question “why write” no longer sounds so rude.

Other interesting things

• Here is an article in the Guardian about the controversy that ensued after publication of Wifedom.

• I want to read this feminist retelling of 1984.

• In LitHub, Maris Kreizman explains why book recommendations from a human are better than algorithms. As my daughter would say, duh-doy.

• Nothing I’ve read in recent history has made me laugh harder than this earth-shattering reveal.

• I would still wear this.

Bye for now!

S.