Anna Funder at Harvard Book Store

Harvard Book Store welcomes ANNA FUNDER—award-winning author of of the novel All That I Am—for a discussion of her new book Wifedom: Mrs. Orwell's Invisible Life.

About Wifedom

At the end of summer 2017, Anna Funder found herself at a moment of peak overload. Family obligations and household responsibilities were crushing her soul and taking her away from her writing deadlines. She needed help, and George Orwell came to her rescue.

"I’ve always loved Orwell," Funder writes, "his self-deprecating humour, his laser vision about how power works, and who it works on." So after rereading and savoring books Orwell had written, she devoured six major biographies tracing his life and work. But then she read about his forgotten wife, and it was a revelation.

Eileen O’Shaughnessy married Orwell in 1936. O’Shaughnessy was a writer herself, and her literary brilliance not only shaped Orwell’s work, but her practical common sense saved his life. But why and how, Funder wondered, was she written out of their story? Using newly discovered letters from Eileen to her best friend, Funder re-creates the Orwells’ marriage, through the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War in London. As she peeks behind the curtain of Orwell’s private life she is led to question what it takes to be a writer—and what it is to be a wife.

A breathtakingly intimate view of one of the most important literary marriages of the twentieth century, Wifedom speaks to our present moment as much as it illuminates the past. Genre-bending and utterly original, it is an ode to the unsung work of women everywhere.

Praise for Wifedom

"Simply, a masterpiece. Here, Anna Funder not only re-makes the art of biography, she resurrects a woman in full. And this in a narrative that grips the reader and unfolds through some of the most consequential moments—historical and cultural—of the twentieth century." —Geraldine Brooks, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, author of Horse

"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

"Funder is a boundary-breaking, risk-taking writer whose previous books synthesized memoir, fact and imagination to impressive effect. . . . At her best, Ms. Funder shows that radical compassion—which is not the same as forgiveness—will move one closer to understanding, in marriage and biography, every time." —Donna Rifkind, The Wall Street Journal

Masking Policy

Masks are encouraged but not required for this event.