Author Anna Funder explores the fascinating influence of George Orwell’s first wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy

WIFEDOM Anna Funder (Hamish Hamilton, $36.99) In 2017, Anna Funder — the Miles Franklin Award-winning author of All That I Am and Stasiland — found herself at the kind of “moment of peak overload” familiar to many women. Overwhelmed by parenting, caring for extended family, running a home and work deadlines, she retreated into the work of a favourite author — an essay collection by her literary “hero”, George Orwell. The episode sparked a realisation: that despite she and her husband “imagining we divided the work of life and love equally, the world had conspired against our best intentions. I’d been doing the lion’s share for so long we’d stopped noticing.” Resolving to “look under the motherload of wifedom I had taken on, and see who was left”, she decided to read Orwell’s classic writings “on the tyrannies, the ‘smelly little orthodoxies’ of his time” and “use him to liberate myself from mine”. And yet, she soon found herself fascinated less by the famed author than his first wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy — whose crucial role in Orwell’s life and work had, she found, been elided by her husband and his biographers. The result is Funder’s keenly awaited latest book, Wifedom. Finding insufficient source material for a biography and rejecting the potential for a novel due to her sense it wouldn’t allow her to show “the sly ways” Eileen had been hidden from history, Funder has combined fiction and biography with memoir and literary criticism. She thus aims to take the available facts of Eileen’s life — “a woman in pieces” — and “make her live”. A touchstone throughout is a series of six letters written by Eileen to her friend, Norah Symes Miles, which span the period of her marriage to Orwell, from 1936 to 1945. They help Funder to illuminate Eileen’s early uncertainties about married life, her courage during the couple’s time in Spain during the civil war, her unstinting labours as Orwell’s overworked and underappreciated housekeeper, breadwinner, editor and typist, and general helpmeet, and — poignantly — the fear and loneliness that attend the book’s melancholy ending. Writerly depictions of real people are always partial, but Funder makes a convincing case for her interpretation of Eileen’s life, one that pays careful attention to the ways “a woman can be buried first by domesticity and then by history” as it seeks to redress the patriarchal “fiction in which all the main characters are male and the world is seen from their point of view”, which renders women “supporting cast”. By endeavouring to restore Eileen to view, Funder also seeks to make visible the broader experience of gendered labour and caregiving (what she calls “wifedom”), while also asking — as she tries to hold in mind her admiration for Orwell as a writer alongside his flaws and failings — “how men can imagine themselves innocent in a system that benefits them, at others’ cost”. The result is a brilliant and often affecting portrait of a life which particularly sings in the book’s fictional passages. Indeed, while a reader might be left wanting more of these especially vital, absorbing sections of prose, there’s an honesty to Funder’s hybrid approach that is compelling in itself and which speaks to the impossibility of fully recapturing stories of the past — particularly when, as in this case, so much has already been done to obscure them. THE PIT Peter Papathanasiou (MacLehose Press, $32.99) The latest outback noir from acclaimed author Peter Papathanasiou begins with senior constable Andrew Smith, aka Sparrow, receiving a dramatic phone call: nursing-home resident Bob Cooper wants to confess having committed a murder in WA’s remote North West some 30 years ago. Determined to prove himself in the absence of his colleague, detective sergeant George Manolis — the star of Papathanasiou’s previous novels, The Stoning and The Invisible — Sparrow agrees to accompany Bob to the murder scene. The two set off on an unlikely road trip from Perth to the Kimberley, accompanied by a much younger fellow nursing-home resident who, Bob is adamant, must not learn the real reason for their journey. NEDINGAR: ANCESTORS Isobel Bevis & Leanne Zilm (Fremantle Press, $24.99) “Please Mum, I want to meet my Ancestors,” asks the young narrator of this dual-language Noongar and English children’s picture book about identity and belonging. The first book by First Nations writer-illustrator duo Isobel Bevis and Leanne Zilm, it’s accompanied by a Noongar story-time video that’s available online via a QR code. “I was inspired to write the book because I felt a sense of disconnect during the COVID pandemic from boodja, my country, and my moort, family,” says Bevis, a Wilman, Ballardong Noongar author and teacher. For her, speaking Noongar language is a way “to honour my mum and dad, and my grandparents, who were denied the opportunity to learn and speak their mother tongue”.