George Orwell’s unacknowledged debt to his wife Eileen

Anna Funder, the author of Stasiland, is a premier-league writer who can roll fiction, reportage, criticism and memoir into glinting prose, her sentences like handheld treasures you keep turning over, admiring their graceful contours and crafted precision. Lately she’s published little. In fact Wifedom is a book wrenched from the swirl of domestic duties that drown out women’s voices – the lifeline, in this case, being a chance find at a moment of ‘peak overload’ when she stumbles on a rare edition of George Orwell’s collected non-fiction.

Diving into his essay ‘Why I Write’, she looks for self-recognition and pauses over a sentence. Orwell contrasts people who ‘live chiefly for others, or are simply smothered under drudgery’ with ‘the minority of gifted, wilful people [he means writers] who are determined to live their own lives to the end’.