Funder does a virtuoso performance on the theme, adding personal memoir, some fictional reconstructions and a glittering sense of purpose.

Funder takes this fascinating material and creates a peculiar hybrid. Wifedom is part biography and part speculative fiction written in the present tense.

Almost impossible to characterize Anna Funder's book about Eileen Orwell, known — if she's thought of at all — as 'wife of George Orwell.' But this dazzling, infuriating book argues that she deserves a bigger place in history.

With the precision of a historian, Funder cobbles together scant details to reconstruct a life. And with the imaginative force of a novelist, she speculates in clearly sign-posted moments on what that life was like.

Wonderful, genre-bending.

Ms. Funder is a boundary-breaking, risk-taking writer.

A brilliant, creative hybrid of life writing, feminist polemic and literary criticism, which upends the way we read.

I agree with Funder that Eileen’s treatment in life and afterlife isn’t accidental.

A book that dares to imagine lives beyond social conscription.

It’s with a combination of outrage and amusement that Funder observes how Orwell loved to immerse himself in the lives of the downtrodden.

Rattlingly fierce.

The book is a painstaking work of restoration.

Funder aims to fill in the gaps of the six major biographies of Orwell published between the 1970s and 2003, all written by men, which gloss over his mistreatment of women and serial infidelity. She finds no evidence of the commonly-held notion that the Orwells had an open marriage.) She meticulously dissects her predecessors’ work to show the various ways O’Shaughnessy is erased or diminished, such as the use of the passive tense to suggest that things just happened, as if by magic.

As Eileen fleshes out, Funder becomes a ghost. Wifedom is haunted by questions she does not ask of herself. We are not owed Funder’s intimacy, but it is a strange kind of irony that, having been hidden by history, Eileen becomes a hiding place.

Funder’s engaging and passionate account of this overlooked woman is her attempt to paint her back into the picture.

A provocative mix of facts and 'a fiction that tries not to lie,' using her remarkable subject’s vivid letters as prompts for imagined scenes that fill the maddening gaps in Orwell’s autobiographical accounts and those of his biographers.

The result is an engaging, informative, but flawed book that focuses attention on Eileen O’Shaughnessy—who was married to Orwell from 1936 until her premature death in 1945—but too often speaks on her behalf. Funder insists early in the book that she chose not to write a novel about Eileen because she did not want to 'privilege my voice over hers' but this is frequently what she does.

Funder, who came to this project an even bigger fan than me, has smashed the illusions that biographers have upheld about Orwell.

The memoir portions of Wifedom aren’t quite as captivating, but it’s clear why Funder wanted to embed her biographical scholarship within her own experiences. Making visible the extent of Eileen’s influence on Orwell’s life and work matters because the condition of 'wifedom,' understood as daily unpaid care work, continues to be distributed unfairly, falling mainly on women’s shoulders. Yet this undervalued work is as necessary as what Funder does so well in Wifedom: retelling history to be more considerate and accurate..

Potent.

Electrifying.