George Orwell

On the second page of this book are startling facts about Malawi. In the 1980s and 1990s, this country of around ten million people sheltered more than a million refugees, many of them having fled civil war in Mozambique. Malawians, already suffering the crippling effects of poverty and poor health, provided safe haven to waves of displaced and desperate people coming across their border. Perhaps this succour was not always offered happily, but what mattered is that it was offered. Melinda Ham’s placing of this example so early in her book is surely deliberate. With thoughts of Malawian tolerance and generosity echoing through the text, she forces the reader into making unsettling comparisons with recent Australian responses to refugees.

Wifedom is both an immovable and an irresistible book, an object and a force. Anna Funder, the author some years back of the bestselling Stasiland (2003), has written another great and important narrative of oppression and covert suppression, in this case of the first Mrs George Orwell, Eileen O’Shaughnessy (1905–45). The oppression and suppression are or were the work of her liberal and emancipatory husband – the nearest thing we have these days to a lay saint – and of his six (male) biographers. While nowhere a nasty book (what the Americans would call ‘mean’), it’s a kind of St George and the six dwarves. What’s strange is the persistence of the old bromides. In a recent Guardian review of D.J. Taylor’s Orwell: The new life (2023) – the biographer’s second go-around – Blake Morrison refers to ‘the practical Orwell’ and ‘the complaisant Eileen’. He wouldn’t have said either thing if he’d been able to read Funder’s new book.