0:01

This is The Guardian. Hey,

0:07

Jane Lee here. Earlier

0:09

this year, I spoke with Australian

0:11

author Anna Funder about her book,

0:14

Wifedom, Mrs Orwell's Invisible Life. It

0:16

focuses on Ileano Shaughnessy, the first wife

0:18

of George Orwell, and the little-known part

0:21

she played in his success. Now,

0:24

since we aired this episode, the

0:26

book has attracted some controversy. The

0:28

publisher has agreed to issue corrections

0:30

on some inaccuracies. But

0:32

Wifedom was also one of Penguin's 10 best-selling

0:34

nonfiction books of 2023, and this was one

0:38

of my favourite interviews from this year. So

0:41

here it is again. Hope you enjoy it. I'm

0:48

Jane Lee, coming to you from Wurundjeri land,

0:50

and this is The Fool's Story. George

0:58

Orwell has long been lionised as

1:00

a literary champion for the poor

1:02

and oppressed, bringing us classics

1:04

like Animal Farm, 1984, and Down

1:06

and Out in London and Paris.

1:09

But what if Orwell was a hypocrite

1:11

who hid the secret to his success

1:13

from the world? A

1:16

new Australian book called Wifedom is

1:18

shedding light on the life of

1:20

Orwell's wife, Ileano Shaughnessy, and the

1:22

important role she played in writing

1:24

some of his famous works. Today,

1:30

author Anna Funder on what their

1:32

marriage can teach us about power,

1:34

wives, and the patriarchy. It's

1:36

Tuesday, the 4th of July. Tired

1:55

of ads barging into your favourite news

1:57

podcasts? Good news. listening

2:00

on Amazon music is included with your

2:02

prime membership. Just head to

2:04

amazon.com/ad free news podcasts to catch

2:06

up on the latest episodes without

2:09

the ads. I'm

2:14

Jess and I'm Jen and we're the host

2:16

of the beauty podcast fat mascara. One of

2:18

the makeup products we get asked about the

2:20

most is false lashes. They can be tricky,

2:23

but not since we discovered impressed press on

2:25

falsies, the world's first pre-bonded press on lashes.

2:27

That's right. No glue necessary. Just press them

2:29

on underneath your natural lashes and go one

2:32

easy step. Now everyone can lash get

2:34

yours today at impress falsies.com/beauty and use

2:36

the code beauty for 25% off

2:38

all impressed falsies products. That's impressed

2:41

falsies.com/beauty and use the code beauty

2:43

a checkout for 25% off

2:45

impressed falsies products. Anna,

2:54

you've written a book about

2:56

Orwell's wife, Eileen O'Shaughnessy, but

2:58

before we talk about who she is, you've

3:01

always loved George Orwell as a writer. Tell

3:03

me, tell me more about that. I've

3:06

always loved George Orwell because I've

3:08

loved how he has been able

3:10

to write very personal nonfiction accounts.

3:13

So I've loved the road to Wigan Pier where

3:15

he goes north in

3:17

the early thirties and goes into

3:20

this coal mining town called Wigan

3:22

and literally puts his six foot

3:24

poof frame into the coal mines and lives

3:26

with coal miners and so on and writes

3:28

about that or homage to

3:31

Catalonia where he's off in the war and

3:33

writes about what that's like to be in

3:35

the trenches. He's

3:37

got this wonderful self-deprecating

3:40

clear eyed underdog view of

3:42

the world, which I've always really loved. And

3:44

then of course there are his

3:46

most famous books, Animal Farm in 1984. And

3:49

for someone like me who's interested

3:52

in power, who has it and

3:54

how it works on people, his

3:57

point of view has always been

3:59

absolutely disgusting. wonderful to me. And

4:03

I was surprised to learn in reading

4:05

this that George Orwell was actually raised

4:07

in a household full of politically engaged

4:09

women. So what is it

4:11

that interests you in the women in his

4:14

life? You can read as I did to

4:16

six major biographies of Orwell and

4:18

not realize that he was raised

4:20

in a household of women and

4:22

politically engaged left-wing intellectual women at

4:25

that. The biographers

4:27

tend to emphasize his inheritance through

4:30

his male line but

4:32

his mother was half French, a

4:35

Fabian, which is a left-wing socialist

4:38

kind of group that she belonged to, and

4:40

his aunt, her sister, was a

4:42

Fabian, a suffragette who demonstrated

4:45

with the Pankers and got arrested for

4:47

it, a kind of sexually

4:49

liberated woman who lived with a man

4:51

without marrying him and then married him

4:54

in her 50s. She was an actress

4:56

on the stage in Fordable. She

4:58

ran a literary salon

5:01

with quite well-known writers, H.G. Wells

5:04

and Ines Betts.

5:07

So you would think that for

5:09

a politically engaged writer interested

5:11

in left-wing politics and power and

5:13

the power of words, this

5:16

inheritance through his mother and aunt would

5:18

be the most important one. But that's

5:20

really written out of the

5:22

biographies, as it were. So it's both

5:25

a fascinating inheritance and it's fascinating that

5:27

we don't know about it. Well,

5:30

let's focus on the woman at the

5:32

center of your book, Orwell's wife, Eileen

5:34

O'Shaughnessy. Tell me a little bit about

5:36

what her life was like before she

5:38

married him. So Eileen O'Shaughnessy

5:40

was born in 1905. She

5:42

was a couple of years

5:45

younger than Orwell. Orwell thought of

5:47

himself as lower upper middle class,

5:49

which I think means upper middle

5:51

class aspirations without

5:54

the money really to fulfill them. And

5:56

she was slightly more upper

5:58

upper middle class. very clever. She

6:00

was head girl in Duxford High School and

6:03

she won a scholarship to study English

6:05

to read English at Oxford

6:07

in the 20s at a

6:09

time when women had only been able to graduate

6:11

from Oxford for the last four years or so.

6:14

She went and read English at

6:16

Oxford under Tolkien of the Hobbit

6:18

fame and she

6:20

was lively, whimsical, funny, self-deprecating

6:23

and extremely clever. And when

6:25

she met Orwell, she had

6:28

been working for about nine years

6:30

after graduation in various kinds of jobs

6:33

that were available to women at that time, also

6:35

doing a bit of writing. And

6:37

she had then enrolled in an MA

6:39

in psychology. So she was studying to be

6:41

a psychologist when she met Orwell. And

6:47

she married George Orwell in June

6:50

1936. So how did

6:52

being married to him change the

6:55

trajectory, if you like, of her life? Well,

6:57

it changed it enormously. I think the

7:00

thing that perhaps changed it

7:02

most for her was not getting a first at

7:04

Oxford, which she somehow thought she might get. She

7:06

only got a second. And

7:08

so perhaps then her confidence was

7:10

wracked, really. And she shifted from,

7:13

I think, possibly wanting to be

7:15

a writer herself, which she could have been, to

7:18

marrying this writer. So Orwell fell in love

7:20

with her at first sight. And

7:22

she took a bit longer to come around.

7:25

And when she married him, she

7:27

had the word obey taken out of her

7:29

wedding vows. So when I was

7:31

researching this book, I was finding out these things. I was

7:33

thinking, what kind of a woman does that? But

7:36

she really put all

7:38

her intellectual effort, which

7:40

was tremendous, and energies

7:43

behind Orwell and behind

7:45

his writing, really, being

7:47

married for many women, changed

7:49

their lives from being something at

7:51

which they were the centre to

7:53

something on which they were perhaps

7:55

more decentered or more on the

7:58

periphery in the man's life with the centre. That

8:00

was certainly the case for her. And

8:02

she put her efforts into making him into

8:05

a better writer. In fact, after the

8:07

wedding, people close

8:10

to Orwell were astonished with

8:12

the word they used and how much

8:14

better his writing became, although no one

8:16

would or could attribute that to her

8:18

influence. Well, you also argue

8:20

that Eileen has been buried by history,

8:23

especially the role that she played in

8:25

one of Orwell's best-known books, Animal Farm.

8:29

Come and visit Animal Farm.

8:31

Where all animals are equal,

8:33

but some are not equal. First,

8:37

can you tell us a little bit about Animal Farm

8:39

and I guess what makes it so unique? Animal

8:44

Farm was written during the Blitz

8:47

in the war in London, as

8:49

Hitler is raining bombs down on London.

8:52

And Eileen known Orwell insists on living

8:54

in London and not moving to the

8:56

relative safety of the cottage at Wellington.

9:00

And during the war, he wanted to write an

9:02

essay critical of Stalin. Stalin at that point was

9:04

helping the Allies win the war against

9:07

Hitler. And Eileen

9:09

knew that likely no

9:11

such essay critical of such a

9:13

crucial ally would be able to

9:15

be published, nor would

9:17

it be very popular because they were very much

9:19

hoping that with Stalin's help, they

9:22

would be able to fight off Hitler, which

9:24

didn't look particularly likely at that time. So

9:27

she convinced him to

9:29

write an allegory instead, to

9:31

write this criticism of Stalin

9:34

as a novel. And

9:36

she'd studied allegory and

9:38

fable under, as I said, Tolkien and

9:40

others at Oxford. So she knew how

9:42

to do it. And

9:45

they wrote Animal Farm, which is a short

9:47

and delightful book. That's 30,000 words. You

9:49

can read it in an afternoon. They

9:52

wrote that in bed together at night

9:54

to keep warm because they couldn't afford

9:56

to heat their house as

9:59

the bombs were falling. on London. So

10:01

he would write during the day. She

10:03

was working at the Ministry of Censorship

10:06

in Senate House and

10:08

then later at the Ministry of Food in

10:10

order to support them. But she would

10:12

come home each evening and they would work

10:14

on it together. Her colleague

10:17

was a novelist called Letis Cooper and

10:20

they became very good friends. And

10:22

Eileen would come into work every

10:24

day and as Letis put

10:26

it in a memoir and in accounts that

10:29

she's written at that time, would

10:31

regale everybody with the latest

10:33

instalment of Animal Farm. And

10:35

Letis said that Eileen knew at

10:37

once that it was a winner

10:40

and that they all loved to hear each

10:43

day how the book was progressing. So

10:45

Letis has left written accounts of

10:47

that. So it's very clear that

10:49

that involvement was deep, it was

10:52

daily, it was ongoing and it was a source

10:54

of great joy for Eileen.

11:02

Animal Farm has Eileen's

11:05

voice, her whimsy and

11:07

her whip and her gentleness

11:10

all over it. And it

11:12

also is an absolute outlier in

11:14

all of Orwell's works. Instead

11:17

of having a kind

11:19

of a slightly disgruntled every

11:22

man like Winston or Gordon

11:24

Comstock as its central character,

11:26

kind of Orwell's standing figure,

11:29

it has a genuine ensemble cast

11:31

of characters. And it's

11:33

very unawellian in that it

11:35

notices and is able to depict

11:38

the female as well as the male characters

11:40

in this cast of animals. And it has

11:42

a perfect fable structure. Again,

11:45

after it was published, his best

11:47

friend Richard Rees and

11:49

his publisher Frederick Warburg were

11:52

absolutely astonished at Animal Farm. And

11:54

Frederick Warburg, his publisher said it

11:57

was as if the writer of rather

11:59

gray novels had suddenly taken

12:01

wings and become a poet.

12:04

But neither of them would attribute that

12:07

to Eileen's influence. And

12:09

everybody since, including the biographers,

12:11

have been very, very

12:13

careful about not

12:16

crediting her too much with

12:18

helping or writing. People

12:21

don't want to take away from Orwell, but

12:23

why that should involve erasing

12:25

the contribution which was enormous

12:28

of Eileen is

12:30

a mystery. I mean, it kind of

12:32

speaks to this idea of the myth of the

12:35

male genius, which exists in so

12:37

many fields, but particularly in art.

12:39

It's very hard to shatter and

12:42

people get very defensive about it when

12:44

you try to. Is that

12:46

part of the reason, do you think, that perhaps the

12:49

biographers didn't want to shatter

12:52

this illusion that Orwell's genius is

12:54

completely independent of any of the

12:56

influences in his life? I

12:59

think that's exactly right. I think

13:01

we love superheroes and we love

13:04

geniuses and they are

13:07

self-made. They don't

13:09

owe anything to mothers or

13:12

aunts or sisters or

13:14

intellectual friends or lovers or patrons

13:16

who happen to be women or

13:19

to your brilliant, brilliant

13:22

wife. Well,

13:24

I think that kind of manufacturing

13:26

of a man who does

13:29

it all alone is

13:31

a damaging myth for the women who

13:33

are doing enormous amounts

13:35

of work in the lives of

13:37

men all around us even today.

13:40

And that's something that I wanted Wifedom,

13:44

his book, to look very closely at. I

13:46

mean, I make no bones about it. I come at

13:48

it visionally from a position of kind of envy. It's

13:50

like, oh my God, I'm a writer and a wolf.

13:53

Hang on a second. I'm

13:55

married to a really nice man who does

13:57

lots of stuff, but still, I do more.

14:00

and of the work of

14:02

life and love and family and everything else.

14:05

So I kind of come at this with

14:07

this division of envy, which actually,

14:10

as it turned out, was

14:12

quite an insightful writing position

14:14

to come from. Beyond the

14:17

intellectual and creative

14:19

contribution that Eileen made, how

14:22

else did she give George the time

14:24

and the space to write during their

14:26

marriage? Well, she did everything. So

14:28

she did the cleaning. Consequently, they lived in quite a dirty house,

14:30

and I think she was very good at it. But

14:33

all the shopping and the cooking,

14:35

which she was extremely good at,

14:37

the organizing of any

14:39

dinner parties, hosting people over,

14:41

including his relatives, sometimes for months,

14:44

an aunt, a nephew, dealt

14:47

with all his correspondence with his agent

14:49

and publishers, edited everything,

14:52

typed everything, dealt with

14:54

all his correspondence, provisioned

14:57

his life, organized his holidays, travel,

14:59

everything. She did absolutely

15:01

everything, and that involved, for instance, at

15:03

Wallington cleaning out the

15:06

disgusting latrine, the privy.

15:08

So Orwell had a very

15:11

famously sensitive sense of smell. He

15:13

also was tuberculosisic most of his life, which

15:15

is a horrible thing. But

15:18

in the early days of marriage, she was

15:20

left literally wading into

15:22

shit to clean out the privy. So

15:25

she did everything. And

15:28

she supported him financially, as I said, which is

15:30

very much played down or ignored

15:33

or obscured in the biographies. Without

15:36

which there's no way that he could have written

15:38

as much as he did, I suppose. He

15:41

couldn't have written as much, most certainly. He

15:43

wouldn't have lived as he did in his

15:46

condition, and certainly the books would not

15:48

have been as good. How

15:51

do you think that would have been for her

15:53

at that time? Look,

15:55

as I say, Eileen,

15:58

one of the things about Eileen was everybody. She

16:01

was obviously also very funny, but

16:03

also kind of self-deprecating

16:07

and self-effacing. So

16:10

I don't think she would ever

16:12

have claimed credit in any

16:14

obvious or public way, which

16:17

is to say that makes her into this

16:19

kind of admirable person who

16:22

essentially works in the service of another.

16:25

And another way to say that is it makes

16:27

her into an ideal wife. I

16:30

think today we are changing what it is

16:32

obviously to be a wife. I'm

16:34

talking about in a heterosexual arrangement because

16:36

I'm talking about patriarchy. But

16:39

I think having a much more fluid notion

16:41

of what it is to be a man

16:43

or a woman, a much more fluid notion

16:45

of gender or marriage is

16:47

opening up a much

16:49

better conversation about these roles and

16:51

enabling us to look at the

16:54

traditional role of being a woman, a wife

16:57

in patriarchy married to a man

16:59

and the sort of labour and

17:01

life theft that that involves. I

17:04

don't think she would ever have

17:06

claimed credit, but I would mind

17:08

claiming some of it for her. Well,

17:30

hello ladies and germs boys and girls from Wondery and

17:32

Dr. Suess. I've

17:53

been given the honor of hosting

17:56

a new podcast. That's right me,

17:58

your illustrious host, The Grid. I've

18:00

sent every late night show host packing,

18:03

and instead I'm here to make the

18:05

who's who of hooli-wood cry boo-hoo. You

18:07

can say I'm stealing back the Christmas

18:09

spotlight. My faithful dog, Max, will be

18:11

dressed as pretty as a Christmas who-ham

18:14

to welcome our guests. And you can

18:16

listen with the whole family as these

18:18

ridiculous celebrities try to persuade me there's

18:20

anything good about the insufferable holiday season.

18:23

So tune in and turn up the

18:25

volume for a hilariously bad time. While

18:27

those kids squabble in the backseat on

18:29

the drive to grandma. Follow Tiz

18:31

the Grinch holiday talk show on

18:33

the Wondree app or wherever you get your

18:35

podcasts. You can listen to Tiz

18:38

the Grinch holiday talk show early and

18:40

ad-free right now by joining Wondree Plus

18:42

in the Wondree app or on Apple

18:44

Podcasts. I

18:51

found it really interesting how you

18:53

found Eileen Ashaunasi in the

18:55

archives, if you like. Could you tell us a little

18:57

bit about what material you drew

18:59

on to find her? I

19:02

discovered that there is an Orwell

19:04

Society in London. Its

19:06

patron is the son that Orwell

19:08

and Eileen adopted during the war.

19:10

His name is Richard Blair because

19:13

Orwell's real name was Eric Blair.

19:15

And I went into the archives in London,

19:18

the Orwell archive. And I actually

19:20

I couldn't believe it. I couldn't believe

19:22

that they would let me in there

19:25

in a way. They let me in there with

19:27

boxes and boxes of these original

19:29

letters and diaries of Orwell's mother

19:31

and of Orwell. So it was

19:33

kind of deeply thrilling and amazing.

19:36

But I could see there

19:38

original copies of these

19:41

letters that Eileen had written to

19:43

George in her own handwriting. And

19:46

also six letters that Eileen wrote

19:48

to her best friend from Oxford

19:50

days. His name was Nora Symes

19:53

Miles. So there was this wonderful

19:55

cache of intimate material about the

19:58

marriage really from the book. beginning

20:00

to the end. So discovering

20:02

those was really what set

20:05

me off into this six-year

20:08

project, really,

20:11

of rediscovering her and finding out

20:13

about this marriage. And

20:16

in Wyfton, you blend fictional scenes

20:18

from the couple's life together with

20:20

real quotes taken from these letters

20:22

that were written by Eileen and

20:24

her friends to tell her story.

20:27

Why did you decide to do this? The

20:29

fictional parts are based

20:32

very closely on, for

20:35

instance, where Eileen was and what was happening

20:37

in her life. I know

20:39

an enormous amount and can make this

20:41

fiction, in a way, very

20:43

close to the facts and

20:45

use the real letters. I

20:48

have these sections which are

20:51

based on her letters, these six

20:53

letters to the best friend Nora

20:56

and three extraordinarily beautiful letters she

20:58

writes to Orwell that

21:00

are very intimate and very lovely. I

21:03

know where she was when she wrote those letters.

21:05

I know that she was bleeding

21:07

or ill or that he was off with

21:09

another woman and she knew it. I

21:13

know what she's not telling the best friend,

21:15

which is often those things exactly. I am

21:18

able to write scenes where she

21:20

comes to life in a kind

21:22

of 360 way. The purpose

21:24

of it is to bring her back

21:26

to life as a real

21:29

woman who is alive in

21:31

the reader's mind as she was

21:33

in mine and is in mine.

21:36

If the biographers can write

21:38

these stories of a male genius,

21:41

essentially by leaving the women

21:43

on the cutting room floor,

21:45

what they are actually doing

21:47

is writing fictions of omission.

21:50

It seemed to me that I needed

21:53

to write a fiction of inclusion. That's

21:55

what I do. visible

22:00

labor that Eileen provides.

22:03

And her story resonates with you, not

22:05

just as a writer, but also as a wife.

22:08

Can you share a little bit about that with us?

22:11

I am in no way

22:14

any kind of downtrodden wife.

22:16

I'm the most privileged of

22:18

ridiculous kind of fortunate

22:22

women. But still, I

22:24

feel like I like this.

22:27

The world conspires against me

22:29

and my husband, so that

22:32

we have three children. We

22:35

think we share the work of

22:37

life and love equally. But

22:39

a lot of it falls for me, a

22:42

lot of the school messages or organization or

22:44

birthday party organization or holidays

22:47

or shopping or cooking or looking

22:49

after family members and extended family

22:51

or buying birthday presents or organizing

22:53

Christmas or whatever it is in

22:55

this extremely privileged middle

22:58

class life I'm living. Turns

23:00

out not to be equally shared. And

23:03

further than that, the burden

23:05

of discussing it, of bringing

23:07

it up, of allocating

23:10

it in a more shared way

23:12

also falls to me. And I think it

23:15

falls to most women. And that is

23:17

a sign that we feel that it's

23:19

ours either to do or

23:22

to discuss the distribution of. So

23:24

when that is no longer the case, then

23:28

we will have dismantled one of

23:30

the main prongs

23:32

of patriarchy. But we're a long way off. I

23:35

have to say, reading this book, and I

23:37

am newly married, reading

23:40

this book, I really worried more than

23:42

once that maybe there isn't such thing

23:44

as an equal partnership as

23:46

much as we think that there

23:48

is. Because you writing this book

23:50

so many years after Orwell and

23:52

Eileen's marriage, you can see the

23:54

parallels there between in

23:57

those relationships. So I don't

23:59

know. I just. I'm asking

24:02

if you have any hope. What should

24:04

I do? I

24:06

have high hopes for you. I

24:08

think the first thing is to reverse

24:10

this invisibility. The invisibility is a mammoth.

24:13

It's an invisibility of enormous amounts

24:15

of work, of life and

24:17

love and care that

24:20

is absolutely vital to keeping

24:22

all of us going. You know,

24:25

we talk about it in a shorthand way as,

24:27

you know, domestic work and the work of emotional

24:29

labour. It is enormous. It is vital. It's what

24:31

keeps society going. And I think the

24:33

thing is to make that work visible

24:36

because when it's visible, it can

24:38

be shared and people can be

24:41

talked about and it can be shared properly. So

24:43

this work of Wystone, my

24:46

book, is about reversing these

24:48

many invisibilities of history, of biography,

24:51

of patriarchy and hopefully of

24:54

every young and beautiful contemporary

24:56

marriage. I

24:58

mean, we started talking today about all the things

25:00

that you love about George Orwell as a writer.

25:03

And now you've learned so much as well

25:06

about him, but also about his wife, Ilene

25:08

O'Shaughnessy and his treatment of her in their

25:10

private life. So how do

25:12

you reconcile these two things when you read his

25:14

work now? I love

25:16

that question because it's

25:18

a question that underlies the book.

25:21

So the way I go

25:23

with this is I

25:25

don't think anybody leads a

25:27

sort of flawless, unblemished life.

25:31

And we want

25:33

writing, perhaps lots of art

25:35

forms, to show us things

25:37

that are true about life,

25:39

that are hard to look at, that

25:42

are contained between covers or

25:44

on a frame or on a screen. So they're less frightening.

25:47

But in Orwell's case, to look at tyranny,

25:51

sadism, oppression, conspiratorial

25:54

systems of power, in

25:57

order to see that you have to be someone who somehow feels like

25:59

you're a human being. At

26:02

the beginning of the book, there's a scene where my

26:04

daughter says to me, it's

26:07

the height of me too, and she says, what

26:09

are you working on? And I say, it's a

26:11

biography about Orwell and his marriage, and it's hard.

26:14

And she basically says, is that

26:16

because he's an asshole? And I

26:18

say, maybe. But

26:21

the world was set up for men

26:23

to think of themselves as decent human beings,

26:25

even if they were. And

26:27

she says, Orwell must have been interested in this

26:30

if he wrote about it. And then

26:32

she looked at me and she just said, well, why are

26:34

you interested in this, mum? And

26:36

I said, well, maybe I'm an asshole.

26:40

And she just, it was a very

26:42

risky moment of my

26:44

relationship. And she said,

26:46

she's a little shrugged and just says, well,

26:49

isn't everybody? And I was

26:51

kind of immensely impressed by her

26:53

insight into the world or into me or

26:55

something. And also kind of saddened by it

26:57

a little bit. So I think

26:59

in a colloquial way, it

27:01

takes one to know one, but we want

27:03

our artists to look at those things that

27:05

we otherwise wouldn't look at and to represent

27:07

them in narrative, say, that is

27:10

both beautiful so that it's possible to look at them. The

27:13

other thing really specifically about Orwell is

27:16

that he comes up with this concept of doublethink, which

27:19

is the most famously in 1984,

27:21

he describes doublethink as the ability

27:23

to hold two things in your

27:25

mind, one of them at a conscious

27:27

level. So I'm thinking perhaps

27:29

the idea that you're a decent human being

27:31

or a genius or whatever it is, and

27:33

the other at an unconscious level, the

27:36

fact that this relies on the work

27:38

of another, for instance, and

27:40

you can't bring the unconscious into

27:42

the conscious because otherwise, in Orwell's

27:44

words, that would give you a

27:46

sense of guilt. So

27:49

patriarchy is a system of doublethink in which

27:51

men think of themselves as decent human beings

27:53

at the same time as they are allowed

27:55

to, you know, wolf whistle women or

27:57

underpay them or sexually harass them. or

28:00

rape them, and so on

28:02

and so forth. So his insight

28:04

is something that is enormously useful to

28:06

me, and that comes from his work,

28:08

which is also a source of awe

28:11

and delight. So I

28:13

think it's possible to hold both the man

28:15

and the wife and the

28:17

work and the life in

28:19

mind at the same time. I

28:22

mean, another word for

28:24

doublethink is hypocrisy. And

28:27

I suppose even though you

28:29

can hold them together, does it take

28:31

away from any of Orwell's

28:34

righteousness or his championing

28:37

of social justice, knowing

28:39

this other part of his life and this

28:41

other part of his personality through

28:43

the work that you've done? I

28:46

don't think so. I don't think

28:49

it's fair to expect artists

28:52

or even anyone to

28:54

be flawless or

28:56

as good as they think they are. And

28:59

in some ways, Orwell

29:01

valued decency so much

29:03

as a value. You can value

29:05

it because at some level, you know you

29:08

don't have it. Whereas

29:11

Eileen was really a

29:14

deeply decent human being. So

29:16

he married what he wanted. He wrote about what

29:18

he wanted and valued. And

29:21

the fact that he wasn't that

29:23

is possibly the thing that enabled him

29:26

to desire it so strongly.

29:29

And I don't think

29:31

we need our writers or to be

29:33

saints. I don't think they could do the work

29:35

they needed to do and show us the world as

29:37

it is if they were, including

29:40

me, of course. That

29:47

was Anna Funder, author of Wifedom,

29:49

Mrs. Orwell's Invisible Life, which is

29:51

published by Penguin. That's it for

29:53

today. This episode was produced by

29:56

Alison Chan and myself, Sound Design

29:58

and Mixing by Daniel Simo. Our

30:00

theme music was written by Joe Conning. The

30:03

executive producer for this episode was Gabrielle

30:05

Jackson. I'm Jane Lee. Catch you

30:07

next time. Amazon

30:30

Music is included with your Prime membership. Just

30:33

head to amazon.com/ad-free news podcast to

30:35

catch up on the latest episodes

30:38

without the ads. And for thousands of ACAT

30:40

shows ad-free for podcast subscribers. Some shows may have ads. Well

30:43

hello ladies and germs boys and

30:45

girls from Wondery and Dr. Seuss.

30:47

I've been given the honor of

30:49

hosting a new podcast. That's right

30:51

me. Your illustrious host, The Grinch.

30:53

I've sent every late night show

30:55

host packing and instead I'm here

30:57

to make the who's who of

30:59

hooli-wood cry boo-hoo. You can say

31:01

I'm stealing back the Christmas spotlight.

31:03

My faithful dog Max will be

31:05

dressed as pretty as a Christmas

31:07

who-ham to welcome our guests. And

31:10

you can listen with the whole family

31:12

as these ridiculous celebrities try to persuade

31:14

me there's anything good about the insufferable

31:16

holiday season. So tune in and turn

31:18

up the volume for a hilariously bad

31:20

time while those kids squabble in the

31:22

back seat on the drive to grandma.

31:25

So Tiz the Grinch holiday talk show on

31:27

the Wondery app or wherever you get your

31:30

podcasts. You can listen to Tiz the Grinch

31:32

holiday talk show early and ad-free right

31:34

now by joining Wondery Plus in the

31:36

Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts.