I believed that George Orwell was a genius. The parallels that he drew between Trotsky and Snowball in Animal Farm and the similarities between familiar totalitarian regimes and Ingsoc in 1984 awed me with every read. Every one of his works seemed so uniquely his and no one else’s. But the recently published book Wifedom by Anna Funder challenged my admiration for Orwell. By looking into the overshadowed roles of Orwell’s wife, I learned that accurate readership comes from examining the external factors that influence the text.
Wifedom attempts to uncover the overlooked life of Eileen Blair, Orwell’s wife. Eileen was a capable woman who graduated from Oxford University. She was a writer, just like Orwell, and had published a poem titled End of Century, 1984 a full 15 years before his famous novel was released. She had also worked in the Ministry of Information, where she managed government records and propaganda during World War II. Afterwards, she supported her husband by raising livestock, typing and editing drafts, and helping refine Orwell’s ideas for his works. Beyond domestic support, Eileen was a partner and collaborator for Orwell.
However, Eileen never received the proper acknowledgement aside from the title of a dutiful wife who maintained the household. While none of these details can outright prove that she wrote Animal Farm or 1984, the fact that her intellectual influence on Orwell went unquestioned despite the relevant context of her work, education, and collaboration with Orwell seemed to demand an explanation. In response to this ambiguity, Wifedom argues that Eileen was deliberately erased—not only by Orwell himself, but also in how his works have been remembered by scholars who have extensively studied Orwell’s life and work as a prominent literary figure. In Funder’s perspective, the consistent portrayal of Eileen as a mere housewife across Orwell’s biographies is too deliberate to be dismissed as a coincidence, suggesting a socially conditioned tendency to overlook or suppress women’s contributions.
After reading Wifedom, I felt a sense of complicity. I thought that my ignorance had played a part in the manipulation of Eileen’s history. I began to question what I could do within my ability to prevent these cases. The difficulty was in the fact that readers like myself rarely had sufficient background knowledge to find obscured figures such as Eileen. Therefore, ignorance could not be blamed. However, I realized that because of this lack of information, it was our responsibility to be cognizant about dismissing significant contexts.
The responsibility of us readers lies in approaching texts with an awareness that important external factors may have gone unnoticed. To understand this better, I thought back to how I approached other fields similar to literature, specifically music.
As a cellist, I always begin by learning about the composer—who they were, their recent experiences before writing the piece, and why they composed it. For example, while I was studying the Shostakovich Cello Concerto, I initially struggled with trying to form my interpretation from its dissonant melodies. To compensate for my lack of understanding of the sheet music, I studied Shostakovich’s life of constant government surveillance under the Soviet Union. Understanding the context behind the notes and markings allowed me to develop a deeper, fitting interpretation. In contrast, I had never approached literature that way. I had considered Orwell as a genius instead of thinking to understand his works the same way I did with music. It was an easy, convenient, and lazy conclusion. The excuse of an assumed genius eliminated the need for any further inquiry and kept Eileen invisible.
As readers, we need to rethink what it means to “read” a book. Just as learning a math or physics formula doesn’t mean simply memorizing the equations, reading also shouldn’t end with seeing the words in the text. Cultural, historical, and situational contexts often heavily influence arts and literature. Taking time to fully understand their family dynamics and political biases, the author might have had—instead of idolizing an author as a distant genius—brings depth to reading and makes invisible contributors visible. The intent of reading isn’t mere consumption, but an active pursuit of meaning behind the pages.
