Empire: World History - 305. Orwell: Dark Secrets, The CIA, & His Forgotten Failures (Part 4)

Episode Date: November 6, 2025

Why was Orwell’s wife, Eileen, written out of his story when she co-wrote Animal Farm? How did the CIA twist the novel into anti-communist propaganda? As a writer who was so ahead of his time on imperialism and totalitarianism, why did Orwell fail when it came to the patriarchy? Anita and William are joined by Anna Funder, author of Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life, to discuss the women who are missing from Orwell’s biography despite being crucial to his development as a writer. Join the Empire Club: Unlock the full Empire experience – with bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to miniseries and live show tickets, exclusive book discounts, a members-only newsletter, and access to our private Discord chatroom. Sign up directly at empirepoduk.com  For more Goalhanger Podcasts, head to www.goalhanger.com. Email: [e-mail] Instagram: @empirepoduk Blue Sky: @empirepoduk X: @empirepoduk Producer: Anouska Lewis Executive Producer: Dom Johnson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community. Discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, add free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mpowerpoduk.com. Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnan. And me, William Durhampool. We are so excited because we have feminist icon who's written the most brilliant book to talk about this, the fourth episode in our Orwell series. Anna Funder is here and she has written the most sublime book, and I just commend it all to you. Wifton, Mrs. Orwell's invisible life and it really does so much

to turn everything you think you know about Orwell on its head, then put its hand down its throat, then turn it inside out and then waggle it around in the air. Anna Funder, welcome. Thank you so much. I've been keeping you two apart deliberately for months now. The two of you together would be an impossible, an impossible chemistry. Anyway, we'll see it in the next 40 minutes. It's going to happen in the next 40 minutes. It's also going to happen when Anna comes to London. We're going to paint the town.

Very bright pink. Okay, painting the town pink for another time. Let's start, though, with something where black would be a more appropriate colour. And this is weird to start a podcast with somebody dying. But that's where we've got to in the chronology of the story, Anna. So we want to talk about the end of Orwell's life. And let's talk about TB because it was such a massive factor in the decline of a great writer. Well, Orwell actually had terrible lungs all his life.

Even when he was a two-year-old, I went to the archives and opened up his mother's diary. And his mother was this very lively woman who was bored to sobs, although she loved her children. And she filled her diary with entries that just said nothing in cursive. And the next day, nothing. And then there was baby's chest bad. And then there was baby's first word, quote, beastly, end quote. So I think all of that says a lot about all. Well, he had very bad chest.

He had TB basically all his adult life, as far as anyone can tell. And yes, beastly was a very prominent part of his vocabulary in arsenal. And for someone who had a bad chest, presumably moving to the West Highland Island of Jura, it's not going to improve things. It rains sort of 363 days a year and is damp 365 days a year. Do you know, I think there was, I don't know where this is actually true, but it was said that it had a lovely microclimate. And we're talking about immediate post-war London, which is a hellscape.

You know, you can barely find enough winter heat your roots. room and there are blackouts and it's miserable and the food is terrible. Bomb sites everywhere. Bomb sites, just awful for them both to move to Jura and it sounded like a kind of paradise of a sea full of fish and lobsters and a place to plant your greens and very, very isolated but also quite healthy. So he was hopeful when he went. Yeah, but he didn't help himself because he's still chain smoking at this point.

He's working himself to. distraction. I mean, he's sort of, you know, trying to finish the final draft of 1984. If he's working by night, he's got a paraphran lamp on. So, you know, whatever the health benefits of being in the clear sea air are in the evening, you know, it's all undone by the horrible smog coming off the lamps that he's working with. Oh, I know. I've been in that room where he wrote 1984. And I have to say at the end of writing it, he had to type out a fair copy himself. Normally, Eileen would have done it, but she wasn't available, obviously. And his editor and his friend Richard Rees and Fred Warburg tried really, really hard to get a woman to go to Jura from London

to do that typing and to make a fair copy for him. But no one would go. I mean, to get there from London was a 48-hour trip. Yeah, even today, it's quite a trip to get to Jura. I've been to Jura, but I've also been to the sanatorium it weirdly in the Cotswark. where he was taken when he collapsed. It's on the edge of this lovely, you know, sort of perfect Cotswold territory. But it's also quite bleak. You can imagine that it wasn't going to be a very cheery spot to recover. But they didn't keep him there long, did they?

They moved him to, was it a university college hospital in London? So he actually, he typed out this manuscript in this tiny room with a dormer window at Boundhill, on Dua looking out over the sea. And he chain smoked, as you say, in the paraffin lamp was going. and he refused all medical attention. So he's sort of coughing up his lungs, but really killing himself to get this book done, to get 1984 done,

and would only let a doctor have a look at him once that was typed. So he sort of was suffering for his art in this most extreme of ways. And yes, then the Cotswls, and then a tiny room at UCL in London, where his friends could visit him. So, you know, David Astor could visit, and people were coming by. And where David Astor visited him in,

the unusual circumstances of actually marrying for the second time in hospital, in bed. And for those who aren't familiar with the name, David Astor, was one of the great heirs of a fortune in post-war Britain, who lived, I think, in Clivden, which was a great sort of post-war literary salon and political salon. And he owned the observer, which was the leading, left-leaning newspaper of the day. Yes. So Sonia went to see him when he was in the Cotswold, Sonia Brownell, and she was this gorgeous, vivacious, very clever woman who'd been an editor at Horizon magazine, gone off to France, had a fairly disastrous in the end, intense affair with the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and then come back and decided that she would go and visit Orwell. They'd had a kind of very, very brief liaison before, but she went to see him in the Cotswolds, and then she started bringing him books, whiskey news. newspapers and doing bits and pieces of him. And he was besotted and asked her to marry him. And

Horizon was closing up. And she said to a friend, well, Horizon's closing up. I think I'll marry all well. And she did. But they married literally on his deathbed at University College Hospital. There's a wonderful description of that marriage at the opening of DJ Taylor's book, which I know you have your differences with, but it's a wonderful description of these strange figures meeting in in this bleak hospital. But Orwell himself, like a lot of dying people, I think, I have not very much experience of this, but some. And, you know, they keep alive by hoping that they will be able to keep alive,

even though rationally and reasonably, I mean, Orwell said, for instance, they can barely find enough flesh on me to stick an injection into. I'm basically a corpse. But at the same time, he kept a fishing rod handy in the corner of this tiny room because the plan was that he would go to Switzerland, where the air was even better for someone with tuberculosis, even in the end stage, and he would fish. That plan was organised by Sonia, because Orwell wanted it,

with an ex-lover of hers Lucien Freud, very young Lucien Freud, who was going to do literally the heavy lifting of getting Orwell onto a plane that was being chartered to take him to Switzerland. So the fishing rod was a kind of symbol of hope, I think, against hope. literally in that room, he never made it to Switzerland. So he never made it to Switzerland. His friends have accepted that he may not last very long.

Is there a point where he does suddenly think, actually, I really don't, I'm never going to go fishing. I'm never going to use that rod. And does he stop preparing for death? Because we know he had meetings with accountants and lawyers in that almost the last week of his life. So something in him must have, you know, whatever the outside waders and paraphernalia,

were in his room, known that this, you know, this, he wasn't going to get out of this. Maybe, yes. When he was proposing to Sonia and he proposed to numbers of women before he proposed to Sonia, he did say, really what I'm asking you to be is the executrix of a literary man. So he'd had one wife who looked after his affairs, co-wrote Animal Farm, edited everything that he did. Never got credit. But we'll come to that in a minute. Okay.

And then there's a woman at the end, yeah. He's had one brilliant literary wife, and he wants another who won't be a wife of making books, but who will be a wife of looking after his legacy. So, yes, there was this cognitive dissonance going on, which I find totally understandable and utterly heartbreaking. She did guard his legacy, though, didn't she? She was sort of fended off David Bowie, who wanted to make a 1984 musical, which must be one of the great sort of misses of modern artistic history. I didn't know that. That's an amazing idea. You've just blown my mind.

Just, I mean, let's talk about actually, you know, the day that he died because I think one of the last friends, and this is 1949, just to remind people where we are in this great life. One of the last friends to see him alive was the anarchist poet Paul Potts. And, I mean, that's a very sweet visit, isn't it? Sort of brings him tea. Particular brand of tea that he loved. Yes, he loved Indian tea. He didn't want that Chinese filthy stuff. And Paul Potts, who was always broke, you know, always scrounging for money in pubs, managed to find him some tea and buy it.

But then he comes to the door of the hospital and he looks in, he sees that Orwell is asleep and thinks, I'll just leave the tea. And he regretted it afterwards because Orwell died very shortly after, the massive hemorrhage. So is that something that happens with TB? Is that just some blood vessels just burst? I'm no TB expert, but I think that you really just, he'd had several hemorrhages. as before, and this was just a massive one that he couldn't survive. I mean, TB is a very unusual disease to have today.

It wasn't unusual after the war where many people died of TB, or was he particularly unlucky with this very delicate test to have got this terrible disease? Well, actually, he was particularly unlucky in the timing of it, because shortly after that, in the early 50s, antibiotic treatments came in that were effective against TB. So after, you know, sort of a tragic, awful end for a man who was just so, so, gigantic in so many ways, frail, you know, with not enough flesh to put a needle in. We should talk about his legacy. And one of the weirdest ironies, I think, that, you know, that he is known as this lifelong democratic socialist. And yet, one of the first groups to move in on him and his

legacy is the CIA. So the CIA's Office of Policy Coordination, the OPC, secretly obtained the film rights to Animal Farm. And they produced a slightly baddlerized version that was far more to the right than the original novel was. Slightly to the right, they were just bloody nonsense. They made the pigs look like humans because they thought actually, if people think that the capitalists are pigs, they won't like capitalism anymore. I was like that on that very basic level of nonsense meddling, that they managed to sort of get hold of it.

So, you know, that this massively anti-communist message gets completely sort of mish-mashed until you don't really know what it is. I mean, it's bad farming practices, you know, in essence. It's a really ridiculous situation. But it's become, thanks to the CIA partly, the classic anti-communist text now that's used in schools in Britain and all over the world. It isn't just a British and American thing. People, I remember, when Mugabe was going down,

were comparing him to Napoleon the Big in Animal Farm. And, ditto, in Burma. When you travel in Burma, people think that Animal Farm is a Burmese book. all about Burma. We've talked earlier in one of the earlier episodes about how they literally read it as a Burmese political text to this day. There's also just the enormous irony of the fact that in 1984 he talks about these Supreme Powers rewriting history to suit their own narrative. And that's precisely what the CIA tries to do to Animal Farm. I think it's just hilarious to be honest. But let's get back to Anna and her brilliant book, Wyfton.

I mean, one of the themes of this miniseries has been the sense in which Orwell, almost a alone of his generation, particularly alone of the sort of Etonian writers like sort of Robert Byron and all those Aldous Huxley and all those figures that came out of the British establishment in the 20s and 30s, alone of those, Orwell is prescient and reads today as if he's talking to us. The others seem locked in a period of history. And whether we're talking about Orwell's views of empire or Orwell's views of fascism or Orwell's views of communism, he is. He is. He is. He is. He is, someone that speaks directly to us today. We don't need to sort of see him for much of his career as a man of his time. But this is emphatically not the case with Orwell's views of women. And Anna has

written this wonderful book. Can I just say any of our members of our club can get discounts to this wonderful book? Just sign up to Empirepod UK.com. That's Empirpoduk.com. And you can get Anna's book at a discount. And it's worth twice as much as you'd pay for it. Let's talk about the story. William was saying, you know, that everybody's sort of poured over Orwell life and, you know, his motivations and what did he really mean. But that part of his life that was inhabited by really important women, that is almost deleted. Now, I want to know when you first realized that this was, you know, this was ground worth tilling. I would absolutely tell you when I first realized, but first one, I just want to talk about what Willie said. The thing about

Orwell having a different view from his Etonian contemporaries is such an interesting way to cast this question because he was only really by the skin of his teeth and Etonian at all. His mother, who was half French and grew up in Burma, had intellectual interests, was very clever, lively, feminist, Fabian socialist. So Orwell had this extraordinary, lively, intellectual, feminist mother and aunt. So her sister had been arrested with the Pankhurst for demonstrating for suffrage was an Esperantist. Lived in sin, quote unquote, with a French anti-Salinist leftist in Paris, was an actress, used to correspond with Orwell sending him stuff about the latest research into sex and gender roles.

These were really interesting women. The family has no money, basically. Ida, his mother, sends Orwell to a crammer and at 11 he gets into Eaton. But they are really cash-strapped. Orwell used to famously say he came from the lower upper middle class. That sounds like understatement. It sounds like a quite charming thing to say I'm from the lower upper middle. But I went to the house, which was the first house his parents actually owned, I believe, in retirement in Southwold, coastal community,

full of sort of mid-level ex-civil servants of empire. And the opening scene of the book, Whifdom, is Eileen writing a letter to her best friend. I used the real letter she wrote to her best friend, Nora, from their time at Oxford together. And she says, I'm surprised that I'm having such a good time. The house is very small and furnished almost entirely with paintings of ancestors. So she manages to get in this very funny way the sort of former glory of the family and the portraits of ancestors in this tiny house. I thought nothing of it, but a very kind man got me into that house when I was on a book to her

and did a reading in Southwold. and it is a tiny house. It is a tiny house. So Orwell has two things that mark him out as different, perhaps, from his generation. He has this terrific Etonian education, although he didn't really shine there. But he also has this underdog outsider view, which is a leftist view. And that comes from feminist mother and aunt, a left-wing underdog. And I don't think many other old Etonians had left-wing feminist parents who gave

them that particularly underdog Orwellian point of view. And he got that from women. Yeah, I mean, I'm just really interested them with, you know, a suffragette-leaning mother and that sort of strong sense of social justice that he has. Why does he write such weird stuff about women? Because I think six months into your project of writing this book, you find an essay written by Orwell. Can I quote a bit of it, do you?

And then just explain what was going on in that head at the time. There were two great facts about women, which you could only learn by getting married, writes all well, and which flatly contradict the picture of themselves that women had managed to impose upon the world. One was their incorrigible dirtiness and untidiness. The other was their terrible devouring sexuality within any marriage or regular love affair. He suspected that it was always the women who were the sexually insistent partners. And you go on to say, you know, that he has a real hang-up about women being these voracious kind of monsters who want more and more sex and the men sort of have to cope with this and navigate it.

It's not the most flattering portrait of strong women. Yes, no, it's not. I mean, there's a lot of evidence that Orwell was gay, that his real desire was for other men. He did do a lot of what the biographers, some of them euphemies, as pouncing on women before and during his marriage or during. Sometimes women he knew, sometimes women he paid for sex, sometimes women in parks, or after parties or whatever. So there was a lot of sexual assault.

I am looking at what the women said. So the women he pounced on said. And at that time in the 20s, 30s, 40s, nobody was talking, using language of sexual assault. And I don't think women were often saying that they had been raped. But they were shocked. They were surprised. They were appalled.

They ran away. One woman, he jumped on in a park after a party, Hampstead Heath. He jumped on her and she fought him off by negotiating to meet him the next day. She was a young woman he had met once before who'd worked at the BBC. So she manages to get away, but it's a physical attack. And she makes his promise. And of course, she doesn't turn up for a repeat performance in the park the next day, whereupon he writes her a letter about the iniquity of breaking your promise

to come back for another sexual assault. So there's a lot of evidence about his desire for men, and there's a lot of evidence that we would say today's sexual assault. old. Could you go into the first a bit more? Because I mean, obviously a lot of his contemporaries from that generation were gay. It wasn't at all unusual for public school educated boys of that generation to be very openly gay. And many of the writers of his of his era were openly gay, but he wasn't openly gay, was he? I mean, I've looked at it quite closely because I was writing about it and I didn't want to get anything wrong or smear anybody in any way. He was enormously homophobic.

Which was also very common at that time. Also very common. So you've got these contradictions. So he was in love with somebody, another boy at school, which I'm sure is very common. He wrote letters to Cyril Connolly, who was in his form saying, please leave him to me and so on. And then, you know, there was sort of strip searching of 16-year-old Spanish recruits. There was a young man called Denzel who was in the dad's army during the war, who he nearly blew his teeth out with a mortar and then plied him with whiskey and took him off to the movies. And David Taylor actually says, and behind that lurks the shadow of the dark horse.

So I have to say every time one of the biographers kind of goes into murky language, murky euphemistic language, it's often about something sexual. I don't know whether David knows whether Orwell's homosexual desires were ever fulfilled. I suspect they weren't. I think that he was extremely conflicted in a way that couldn't come. to the surface of his consciousness. So one of his friends, after Orwell died, said, a bit like what you're saying, Willie, I actually really never understood why he was so homophobic because when we were younger,

those of us who loved the workers did it practically, meaning we would have just slept with them. So there was a tradition of kind of, well, really, of sex tourism within Britain, kind of going into the east end or going up north or whatever. Orwell, I don't think was doing that when he was. He was in the kips and around the place, but I don't know. And there's a great deal of this also on the British left at this time, in particular if you think of all those Cambridge spies and so on.

Almost all were bisexual or gay. Do you know the thing is, I don't think this was a deliberate choice. I mean, I think that in his family, I don't think that his mother and aunts, who were his intellectual and political load stars, would have blinked if he were gay. There was no sign that, I mean, there were very kind of sexual.

open-minded. So his best friend was Richard Rees, who was never married. So the left-wing aristocrat, who had been an editor of Orwell's and was very wealthy, followed him into the Spanish Civil War, followed him up to Jura to finance that farm and to look after his health in the end of it. So he had this very close editor and friend, bachelor friend. But really, as a gay man, even though you might be much happier out at that time, if you had no money, you would never be able to afford the services, thinking practically, that a wife would give you, particularly a brilliant wife like Eileen. So to live how he lived with a, you know, a domestic servant and an Oxford educated, brilliant writer, editor, wife would just not be possible as a gay man. So there's

that as well, I think. Well, look, we're going to take a break here. We're going to come back and talk more about Eileen, who is just such a fascinating character. But I'll just leave you with a couple of lines before we go to that break. And again, this is from that same essay that Orwell writes, which we think is about Eileen. And again, it's about sex. So we're talking about sex a lot, a lot more than I thought we would in this episode.

But he talks again about sort of sexual intercourse. And, you know, the fact that men are pushed, men are trying to escape from sexual intercourse, to only do it when they feel like it with other women. And the women are demanding it more and more, he says, and more and more consciously, despising their husbands for lack of virility. Join us after the break where we find out how this fits in with Eileen,

who really, I think, deserve better. Hello, I'm David Ulushoge. And I'm Sarah Churchwell. This week, on Journey Through Time, we are exploring the story of the gunpowder plot of 1605, the story of how a small group of Catholics engaged in what would have been the most devastating terrorist attack in all of British history.

The plan was ruthless, blow-up parliament. King James I and most of his family, all in a single blow. The series will tell the story of treason and traitors, of a group of men led by the charismatic Robert Catesby, who believed that the only option left to them to win their rights as Catholics with the violent destruction of the Stuart State. We look at the story of Guy Fawkes,

the nation's most famous traitor, from his recruitment to becoming the plot's fall guy and ultimately being tortured and killed. Finally, we find out why this plot is still remembered now 400 years later. Listen to Journey Through Time wherever you get your podcasts. And as a special treat for listeners, we've got an extract from that series at the end of this episode. Welcome back. So just before the break, we started talking about Eileen, who was the woman who does a lot of work, who actually sort of going to gave up her own career

in order to support Orwell in his. And I think, first of all, we should say what she, did before and what she ends up doing after she gets with Orwell. Can you talk us through that, Anna? And we should describe her, first of all. She's got this lovely open face. The picture, which very cleverly in your front cover is moved almost off centre, so you can barely see her face. When you see the actual picture, she's got this open face. She's got a rather, a sort of boyish beautifulness about her, this little bob of hair. And she's of Irish background, isn't she? Eileen Maud or Charnessy, but born in South Seals rather than on. Yeah, she's often described as very, as beautiful.

It's a very open face. She was somebody who didn't use any makeup. She only used Rouge. And when one of her friends asked her, do you really have to put that on? She said, I only put it on really for other people. Otherwise, they'd worry about me because I look like I'm about to pass out. She's very pale with very dark hair and blue or green eyes, quite pale, tallish and thin. One of her friends said if she had a lot of lovely friends.

When she met Orwell, they met at a party in Hampstead. And it was a party at the flat of a woman who was a divorced South African woman who was studying for a master's in psychology. And so was Eileen. So she was a at a UCL college friend of Eileen's and of Eileen's friend, Lydia. So this milieu is of these women in the 30s, Eileen having done read English at Oxford. And first generation of Oxford women, we should say.

She's one of the very first in there at a time when male undergraduates are often very disparaging about what they would call blue stockings in the literature at the time. And there's rather a fear of these brilliant women among the young men at Oxford. They avoided relationships with the women and often had relationships with each other. Certainly, you know, the evening wars of this world. Goodness, there's a lot of terror of clever women, isn't there? Yeah. Well, thank goodness that's all changed, Anna. And that's not a thing anymore.

So Eileen came from this apparently, quote, mad gay family. Her dad was a customs inspector. They had quite a bit of money, a lot more than Orwell's family. She had an elder brother who was completely brilliant lung and thoracic surgeon who went to study in Berlin under the surgeon who had been Hitler's doctor and stuff. Her brother became an anti-fascist. And Eileen, who was also brilliant and got herself a scholarship. She was head girl at her school, got herself a scholarship to Oxford to

read English. She was funny. I was taught by Tolkien. Tolkien was her professor. I mean, that's amazing. Yes, yes, it is. So she loved animal fables. When she was first married to Orwell, they lived in a tiny hovel in a village called Wallington, 50 miles outside of London with no plumbing and no electricity. So they were kind of both suffering for his art, really. She wrote in her first letter to Nora, she said, I'm really sorry it's taking me six months to write to you. I would have written sooner, but we have quarreled so continuously and really bitterly since the wedding that I thought I'd just write one letter to everyone once the murder or separation was accomplished. So she's hilarious.

And these letters were discovered in about 2005, a cache of six of them to her best friend. And my interest in Eileen was really that I found myself one summer kind of needing inspiration and I have always loved Orwell and always loved his work. I didn't read 1984 till after I'd written Stasi Land for some reason. I just really didn't want to. And then when I read it, it read like the GDR regime. So I read my way through his collected journalism essays and letters and watched him create his writing persona through those four edited volumes,

edited by Sonia Brownell with another. And then when I finished that, I read the six biographies of him with great pleasure. You get these different views on the same person, depending on the personality of the biographer. And then I was still researching around and found these letters that I, not me personally, they had been found, but they were six letters from Eileen to her best friend, starting with this one where she wants to kill him at six months married. And I realized that there was no sense of her as a person and what she'd done in the biographies. And it's actually not because these six letters were missing. It's because the men who wrote the biographies were not looking. And also Orwell didn't help either because he sort of omits her. But look, we've jumped to step because we started off saying they met her to party. We need to know whether it was love at first sight. And then William sort of let in with the description. We need to know what happened. Were there fireworks? How did it develop?

It was absolutely love at first sight for him. He was besotted and he thought this was the woman for him. She said the next day, she'd never heard of him. He was a complete unknown. He and Richard Rees were leaning on the fireplace in their threadbare suits, skinny men, looking, as Eileen's friend Lydia said, rather moth-eaten. Lydia was Russian, thought they looked like some sort of moth-eaten people out of Chekhov and didn't want Eileen to have anything to do with him. Eileen the next day said to a friend, Rosamund, who was the hostess, said, actually, he would really like to see you, should I organise a dinner. And Eileen was surprised and said, oh my God, I was so drunk, rowdy behaving my worst. So Eileen had had a good time. Orwell had fallen in love. Rosamund organized a dinner and it went from there. So he, yeah, and then they married the next year. And so, I mean, there's this bright, wonderful woman who, you know, has the eyes of everybody in the room

on her because she has got this sort of this Irish beauty, you know, the green blue sea eyes and the, you know, the dark hair and the and the translucent skin. How quickly does she start changing from her own woman, a very strong, educated, Tolkien, taught woman into somebody who thinks that actually, you know, this man is worth me diverting my energies, my talent, my intelligence, to serve him in a way, to help him, to make him better? That's a really brilliant question. and that is the question, I think, one of the big questions of Eileen's life. It's one of the big questions of my book Wifdom. And it's a question for many women who go into marriage or go into relationships.

It's a question of how much of yourself can you maintain in a relationship, how much should you give in that relationship, and negotiating those two sometimes conflicting things. And sometimes if you give too much, it can be too late to get yourself back. back because you give so much you end up in a state where you no longer have the strength to get yourself back whole. So something like that is going on in this marriage. But it's a complicated and interesting one.

Three weeks after the party, she said to her friend Lydia, you know that that moth-eaten guy at the party? Well, he asked me to marry him. And Lydia says, she writes us in her memoir, Lydia, so we know it. Oh, my God, no. Oh, God. What did you say? And Eileen says, well, you know, I said to myself, if you're not, if you're not, I said to

myself, if I weren't married by the time I was 30, I'd marry the first person who comes along, so maybe I will. So she's kind of having a bet with herself. But I think she was being kind of humorous there. What I really think was going on was at Oxford, she would have liked to have stayed and become a don of some kind. It was pretty much impossible for women to do, and she didn't get a first. Eileen was the most self-deprecating to a dangerous degree person, combined with this extraordinary cleverness. And the only time in her life where she behaves in such a disappointed way, almost embittered, is when she didn't get a first at Oxford. And I suspect that something happened there that she thought was unfair. She had a great sense of justice. She organized

two walkouts of workers at secretarial offices that she'd worked in, actually one during the war at a ministry, she had a great sense of decency that was the decency that Orwell so wanted to have. And I think that he, you know, he modelled that decency on her. But yes, the issue of losing yourself in a marriage is a big one. And I don't know, I just have to give all the evidence and tell the story. So this strong, brilliant, beautiful woman who also sort of proves her metal in that cauldron of the Spanish Civil War. Just tell us what Eileen was doing at that time.

And so Orwell goes to Spain to fight fascists. He wants to fight and kill fascists, something that, you know, used to seem like it was history and doesn't anymore. But that's what he's doing. And he leaves her in this tiny cottage. And I think that she just thinks, no way am I staying here looking after the chickens. And she sells part of the family silver to fund his kit. But also she manages to get herself a job in the head office of the International Labour Party in Barcelona. So she goes as a French-English typist and she's writing propaganda for Charles Orr,

who's an American economist in that office. So she's working at the political headquarters and he's off in the trenches, bored out of his mind, trying to find a bullet to hit him, basically. So she goes there. And so she saves his life when he's hit by a bullet. She saves his life by getting the visas to get them out of Spain. He's writing on bits of newspaper in these horrible trenches and the backs of envelopes and toilet paper and everything. He's sending it back to her, and she types it all up into what

will become the basis for homage to Catalonia, a book that I had read twice and loved without realizing that Eileen was in Spain, let alone had saved his life. And basically, her political now says informing that book, she must have typed that and realized in the typing of it that he was going to very deliberately tell the story to leave her out. But why did he do that, Anna? as somebody who's thought about him, why do that? It's so churlish. It's churlish to the point of being actually quite cruel, isn't it? It's very deliberate.

So he has to tell the whole story of being shot through the throat without saying that within a day, basically, or day and a half, she was there and she organized all medical care, x-rays, all the transport, put him in the sanatorium. There's that. And then there's the episode when Stalin could see her perfectly clearly. There were Stalinist agents in her office who wanted to wine and dine her, romance her, get information from her. She was a target.

She was terrified. When Richard Reese, Orwell's friend, turns up in Barcelona, he goes to see her at the office and says, let's go to lunch. And she says, I can't. And he says, oh, come on, you can just get away for an hour. And she says, takes him into the corridor because there are literally spies in her office spying for Stalin and says, it will be dangerous for you, Richard, to be seen with me. And he writes down, which all the biographers had access to, this is the first time I have witnessed somebody living under political terror.

Political terror is Orwell's topic. She was the one who lived it, and so she was informing his books with it. I think the big answer to your question, why would he do that, is it Cherlish? I think that, I mean, it's very deliberate. I see it more as something that is a cultural trope. all kinds of men are writing their stories as if women didn't make them possible. The fact that none of the biographers thought to look closely at this very famous episode, this very famous man, this very famous bork, and deconstruct it to see what is being hidden,

I mean, I've done that. That sounds complicated, but I've done it in a narrative way in wife'sdom. it's a shock to me that all world scholars who are much more informed than I am didn't do that. I mean, it's really exciting. It's Cherche la femme who saved his life and made this book possible, and yet she's nowhere. So I think that the biographers are also part of this trope where a great man must do everything on his own and he must not owe anything to a woman because that could possibly take away from his achievement. I don't think it does. I think the story is much more interesting when you can see both sides.

Anna, tell us about her literary additions to his, because from the very beginning, from Wig and Pier, which is being written just as their early days of their marriage, she is not only typing stuff out, but she is editing and contributing to his literary work. That's one of the great revelations of your book, but not only is she humanly in the story much more than the other biographers have allowed her up to date, but she's actually a major literary presence, which is a very important literary, literary, contribution that you've made by unmasking this? Yes. So just after they were married in 1936, several people who knew him well, including Richard Vinson, Fred Warburg, who were editors and publishers of his, said it was remarkable how much his writing improved after he got married. But they too wouldn't name her. It was as if perhaps his happiness in general, perhaps regular sex.

There's all these sort of theories. It was obviously because she had done. He was reluctant at first, but she was very keen to edit his stuff. Eventually, she ended up writing what she called emendations on the back of everything that he did. She was widely thought by her friends to have improved his work by reining in the paranoia, reigning in the satism, raining in the hyperbole. All tobacconists are fascists. Oh, fascists.

I love that one. These sort of provocations that could make your writing a bit less serious. Can we just zone in on Animal Farm, which is a book that I think most people listening to this will have either been forced to read at school or, you know, like me, really enjoyed reading at school? Eileen's fingerprints are all over that and you just wouldn't know it, would you? So tell me what she did. Tell me how, you know, that is a clear bit of evidence of her impact on his work. Animal Farm was written during the war. Orwell, since their time in Spain, really, had been terrified as Stalin was going to. come and kill him. A real terror, but a very unlikely thing to happen because he had been a pretty

low-level militia man, but he thought that someone might knock on the door in Britain and have been sent by Stalin to kill him. In fact, when that did happen one time, he grabbed a gun in the cottage, jump behind the door and said to Eileen, open the door. Anyway, he decides during the war he wants to write an essay critical of Stalin. Eileen always worked to support them financially. actually during their whole relationship. One of the jobs that she did that in was in the Office of Censorship in the Department of Information or vice versa. Department of Censorship in the Office of Information. So she had been in the Department of Censorship during the war working there. Which is Room 101.1. Isn't that the Protein Room 101, right? In Senate House.

She worked at Senate House, which he then later took as the model for the Ministry of Truth, i.e. lies. So she knew what could be published and what couldn't be published. And she said to him, no one is going to publish an essay critical of Stalin right now because he is helping us win the war. But I don't know what the next bit of the conversation was, but the upshot of that conversation was that they turned to writing an animal fable of the kind she had studied under Tolkien, the kind that she had wanted to write because she watched very closely the chickens when they were just married and they're living in the cottage. They all had personalities and she wanted to write about them. So they write this book, Animal Farm. It takes them three months.

she goes off to work at a different ministry, the Ministry of Food at this time, and then she shops for them to find whatever she can find for dinner. She comes home and cooks for whoever's been burnt out. And then they hop into bed together because they can't afford to heat the flat. And they work on the book together every night. So whatever he's done during the day, they work over and they work out what he's going to do the next day. And we know this because every day she went into the ministry and she told her friend Lettis Cooper about it. And Lettis Cooper was a novelist who wrote about this. And all her friends at the ministry knew these installments.

And Eileen was having a ball. When it's finally finished, Orwell gives it to Fred Warburg, who's publisher, who's his friend, who's known him for a long time, and Warburg is absolutely stunned. He says he cannot understand how somebody who's written books

with a stand-in, grumpy character who is himself before has suddenly taken wings and become a poet. He cannot understand it. He knows Eileen well, and he still can't see it. And neither can Richard Rees, who says, we had no idea he was capable or such a thing. And the fact was that book, which Orwell considered to be his best book, he loved it, was the only thing he ever produced that was remotely like that.

Everything else is completely different, and no one has looked. So do we think that she actually raised great chunks of it? Or do we think that she pushed him to write in the style that she was bringing to the table? I mean, how much do we think this came from the mind and heart of Eileen Neo Shawnessy? So when you read Eileen's letters, this whimsy, the murder or separation letter, or the letters about other people, she's someone who can see other people as characters and always has been able to tell stories about them. She's whimsical, she's hilarious, she's astute about people. Orwell is not whimsical.

He has no idea about other people. He has never written another character. He's certainly never written another character. another female character is convincing. When you read her letters and you read Animal Farm, the voice is the same. So I'm sure this could be fed into some computer now to work it out. So I don't know how that practically worked. I don't know.

I mean, they're sitting in bed together there writing this thing. I don't know. But it was joyful for both of them. And Anna, another of your revelations is 1984, that not only was she helping him write this, but she'd already written a book much earlier in her life or a story called End of the Century, 1984. I know, do you know, really? I feel that is a much more minor thing. It looks extraordinary.

She wrote a poem. It looks extraordinary, yes. She wrote a poem called End of the Century in 1984 before she met Orwell, was to commemorate something to do with her high school. And it is imagining a dystopian future of telephathy and mind control. She dies before Animal Farm is published very tragically. And he's writing 1984, he doesn't know what he's going to call it till the end. he thinks he might call it the last man in Europe and so on.

And he calls it 1984. There is no evidence why he did that or how much they had talked about that before she died or whether the poem inspired it or whether 1984 is his homage to her. I don't see that as anything like the kind of really significant contribution, such as the co-writing of Animal Farm. You sort of mentioned that Eileen died and this might be an homage to her memory, calling it in 1984, but we haven't really said how she died. I mean, it's all sort of, you know, what happened? Was it very sudden? Was there warning? How did he feel about it?

I'm always a little bit, well, I have been in the past. The book has been out two years now, and I've been reluctant to talk about that because for my own very selfish reasons, it is the plot shock of the book. But yes, so he was ill with TB. She was very unwell. They adopted a baby in 1994 called Richard. Orwell didn't really want, he didn't turn up for the adoption hearing. As the war was finishing, he wanted to go and do some reporting from Europe. So she has this new baby and he goes off to Europe to do some reporting of kind of very minor consequence, really, for the observer and leaves her.

And she's very ill. She has uterine cancer at this point. She'd had a long history of endometriosis. She'd had bleeds and faints where she'd fallen unconscious and that he knew of. She had spent the best part of her life from the age of 30, ministering to his health, saving his life in every way possible, making everything possible. And when she needed care, it didn't occur to him. It was his responsibility, I don't think.

I think it just didn't. And I think he, and he buggles off. And she organizes an operation, a hysterectomy. He's been very, very controlling about money, even though she's been the one who's been earning it. And she writes in these agonizing letters, organizing his life and hers and writing wills, organizing the baby's life, organizing her medical care to Europe. He spent a month in the Hotel Screeb in Paris, drinking, meeting Hemingway, having a very good time. He didn't write back to her in a very timely way. Anyway, she chose in the end to have an operation that was cheaper than one that would have been safer.

And she seems to have done that because she says to him, I know you don't want me to have this operation at all. I know you're very worried about money. She defends herself. She says, I have to tell you that when I was organizing all your medical care, a lot of that was done by my brother. So you got that for free. And, you know, this procedure would have cost 40 guineas, but we didn't pay for it. But anyway, I'm going to do this cheaply. and it was a disaster.

And she dies alone, or is he back when she's done? No, she's alone. She's 39 and she dies on the operating table. She's very well-connected medically. Her brother had been this Harley Street specialist, and one of them said, you are so, she weighed 45 kilos, and she's a tall woman. You are so anemic that you have to have a series of blood transfusions

and go to hospital and get fatter before we can operate on you. And she says, I'm going to have the cheaper option up here in the north and she does and she dies on the table. Oh, gosh. Allergy to the anaesthesia, is it? What's the? The nisotis was a woman and basically the coroner wanted it to be no one's fault.

The surgeon who performed the operation didn't even turn up at the coronal inquiry and all well when he got back didn't go and see the surgeon, didn't go to the coronal inquiry and made no inquiries. He was distraught. but it didn't seem like the sort of thing that he felt that he needed justice for. Yeah. Distraught, okay, distraught in a really dysfunctional way, not there when she needed him, tight with money when she really needed that.

And then I also read that bit of an essay about women's sexuality and how, you know, they're always pressing men for sex, they're always demanding sex, men have to, you know, run away from it. And I said at the time, he's talking about Eileen. I mean, was he talking about Eileen? Does he look back on Eileen's contribution? What does he leave as her legacy or does he leave nothing at all? He leaves nothing at all. He moved on very, very quickly. Unusually for the time, he wanted to keep the baby Richard. He wanted to keep looking after him. So he hired a very nice young woman who was divorcing a

Cambridge Don. She was a 27-year-old with a child of her own who was in boarding school. And she came as a sort of housekeeper to him. And so we have her testimony, really. She's spoken on radio and spoke to people about what he was like in those days. And she said, I never noticed any grief in him, but he did seem sad and lonely. He offered her all Eileen's clothes. He started proposing to other women he barely knew. Very interesting women. All his girlfriends have always been pretty much, except for the young prostitutes in Burma, usually literary women, interesting women. He started proposing to many other interesting women. You could read this as evidence of his loneliness,

or you could read this as evidence of his callousness, couldn't you? You could look at it in two different ways. That's true. It is callous, certainly, to the women. I mean, good friends of his said a woman who lived till she was 101 called Brenda Salkald, who was a clergyman's daughter. He voted a novel before he. He met Eileen's daughter.

He was in love with her. She refused to have anything to do with him. He said to her, if we got married, you would have to stop seeing your brother. And she said, don't be ridiculous. I'm devoted to my brother. So he had this isolationist impulse from the beginning. We call it coercive control these days. You can get done for it in a court of law.

Yes, exactly. And she also said to him, Brenda, and a couple of girlfriends, this is women who saw him up close and knew him well and liked him, said, you really shouldn't write about people, you haven't got a clue. So I just think he was one of those people who didn't really see other people. I just don't know how to feel about all of this, because I have loved Orwell. I have absolutely loved his work. I have been profoundly moved by it. I've been educated by it. It's taken me into chapters of history that I then became obsessed with. And then to hear this, you know, sort of this very deficient stroke, possibly downright, cruel and sadistic man. I don't know how to feel about him now. And I wonder whether you having

discovered all of this and put all of this together, do you still like Orwell? Do you know, I think it's more shocking when you first encounter it. I have a huge admiration for what he did. He worked so hard. And I love his writing. And I really can separate it from his so-called pouncing and sexual assaults, putting a knife through a live adder, you know. There were all kinds of bizarre things that he, gosh, awkward, cruel, sadistic things that he did. But we're looking at the man who wrote about Room 101 and having rats in a cage on your face. This is a sadistic, grim, paranoid, prescient, important thing to have in literature. We should not expect a Hail Fellow well-met, well-adjusted,

sexually content, every man, decent, upright, upstanding fellow, to produce a work like that. It is our reader's fantasy that is disappointing. We need Orwell to be the man he was, to have written the work he did, and we need her to have been the woman she was, to have co-written Animal Farm. And I don't think knowing any of that takes anything away. I think it's a great addition to our knowledge. If you look at the other writers of his generation, most of them are also pretty hopeless with women and not particularly nice to their wives. Do you think he was any worse than any of the rest of them? I mean, if you look at even War, for example, a kind of monster in many ways at home, Orwell looks benign compared to him. But what's so extraordinary about Orwell is that he isn't the man of his generation when he's writing about imperialism. He isn't the man of his generation when he's writing about fascism. He isn't the man of his generation when he's writing about fascism. He is years ahead about the way he writes about total terrorism and communism.

Is this sort of attitude not exactly the sort of patriarchal attitudes we should expect of a writer from the 1920s and 1930s in a tweed suit? So his vision of colonialism, for instance, and then later, as you say, communism and fascism, that vision, as I mentioned, is very much informed by his mother's feminism and socialism. We have to bear that in mind. It's not as if he was some genius that was totally self-made. He was utterly educated by these left-wing Fabian suffragette women to look at things from the point of view of the oppressed. But he could not look at things from the point of view of women. So he could do it with regard to race in Burma and say the empire is a system

of despotism with theft as its aim. Way before everybody else of his generation. Way before everybody else. But you could also say that patriarchy is a system of wage theft and sexual exploitation as its aim. But that was something impossible for a man of his generation, even with a feminist aunt and mother. So I think that's where we get. And as with all the other writers of his generation, I haven't done a comparative study. But what I am interested in is the fact that they were all able to pretend to be and to be seen as decent fellows in public at the same time as doing this horrendous stuff in private. And women's shame, which is a patriarchal concept, kept what was being done to them private.

And I think that is a core element of patriarchy. And if you look today at Trumpism, so fascism is a very extreme form of patriarchy, comes out of patriarchy and you look at what it's doing to women. We need to be very aware of how these things work. So it's not that he was particularly bad or not as bad as the other men. It's that they were all entitled to this behaviour in a system which is like racism, only it's patriarchy. I've loved this. Absolutely love this.

Thank you so, so much. Anna Funder, as I say, her book, if you would like to order it, we have discount on our club, the EmpirePod UK.com. I really hope you've enjoyed this mini-series. Next up, we're going to be talking about another of our imperial writers, and Joseph Conrad is his name. This may or may not be of any interest. It might just be a background thing, but Orwell loved Conrad. just admired him and absolutely loved his work. And when he was in UCL hospital, Sonia

brought to him a copy of a biography that Conrad's wife had written about Conrad. And the next time Sonia turned up in the room, he threw this book across the room and Hest never do that to me. And she took that so seriously, I think. She was, as you mentioned before, very serious about protecting his legacy from biographers and terrible filmmakers and so on. And I wonder if that was the start of it. It's been so wonderful having you on, Anna, I can't tell you how much you've given, well, me personally, but I'm sure everybody listens to this to think about. And Joseph Conrad is with the wonderful Maya Jasinoff, another extraordinary woman writer.

Woo-hoo! Two, on the trot. Why don't you tell us about something else that people can enjoy William as a bonus episode if they join the club? A wonderful bonus episode on John Buckin of the 39 Steps, another writer who is obsessed with Empire and who's writing about it reflects very interestingly on imperialism. We've got back our wonderful friend of the show, Murray Pittock, from Scotland, to talk about him. So that's if you join up to the Empire Club, you can get access to that. So till the next time we meet, it's goodbye from me, Anita Arnan. And goodbye from me, William Duremple.

Hi there, it's David Olushoge from Journey Through Time, and here's that extract from our gunpowder plot series that I mentioned earlier. The person who's not rejoicing is Guy Fawkes in the Tower. King James himself came to the Tower to question Fawks. That's quite an astonishing fact that Fawks and the King looked into each other's eyes at that moment. And of course, interrogations at this time. I mean, we say interrogations as if they're just being questioned, but interrogations are brutal, violent. events. Yeah, and it's going to get much, much more violent. Forks stands up to the king in a way that actually even impresses the king. He's open that they plan to blow parliament. He said that the aim

had been to blow King James and the other Scots back to their Scottish mountains. He says that to the king. It takes guts. But it's also not the most diplomatic thing to say to the person you've just tried to murder who, and your fate is in his hands. Well, I think Forks has knows what's going to happen. I mean, the king was impressed by his obstinacy. He would not reveal the names of his co-conspirators that he was willing to insult the king to his face. And you have to say about Guy Fawkes, a man who'd been a soldier for 10 years, my God, he had guts. I mean, he is a bad man. He is a religious fanatic.

He's not somebody I admire, but my God, he was brave. You can be brave and wrong. You can be brave and involved in things that are evil at the same time. And he was all of those things. But this willingness to stand up to the king that this is before the torture. If you want to hear more about gumpowder, treason and plot, listen to Journey Through Time, wherever you get your podcasts.