Anna Funder is the author of the international bestsellers
Stasiland and All That I Am. In 2004 Stasiland won the Samuel
Johnson Prize and, along with All That I Am, has been published in
twenty-six countries. All That I Am won the Miles Franklin Award,
and was a finalist for the International IMPAC Dublin Award and the
Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. It was also chosen as a BBC Book of
the Week and Book at Bedtime.
Anna was originally trained as an international human rights
lawyer. She lives in Sydney.
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*
Simply, a masterpiece. Here, Anna Funder not only re-makes the art
of biography, she resurrects a woman in full.
*Geraldine Brooks, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction*
Truly wonderful... Anna Funder has written another brilliant human
portrait.
*Claire Tomalin*
Electrifying... Daring in both form and content, Funder's book is a
nuanced, sophisticated literary achievement
*Kirkus*
A strikingly original study that casts Orwell in new light. Deeply
perceptive, it is testament to forgotten wives of famous men
everywhere.
*Julia Boyd*
Furious and fascinating
*The Times*
Astonishing... Wifedom is no less than the rescue of a remarkable
woman from the deliberate ellipses of default male history.
*Caroline Criado-Perez, bestselling author of INVISIBLE WOMEN*
Taylor's updated life will send readers back to Orwell's compelling
visions of state power and surveillance with fresh appreciation.
Still, it is Funder's evocation of Eileen's fugitive life that
haunts this reader's imagination. It is a spellbinding
achievement
*FT*
An utter triumph, and nothing short of a miracle
*Anne Summers*
Wonderful, unexpected and exciting from beginning to end
*Antonia Fraser*
Astounding... A profoundly essential, significant and
groundbreaking work... a work of love for both Eric and Eileen
*Bernadette Brennan*
An extraordinary blend of forensic historical detective work and
evocative fiction, as well as snatches of memoir. It not only
writes O'Shaughnessy back into the story but also questions how far
we've really come in terms of gender equality. To read about
O'Shaughnessy is to fall in love with her
*Radio Times*
Reminiscent of Erik Larson's In the Garden of Beasts or Julian
Barnes's The Noise of Time . . . a riveting biography that not only
rediscovers Eileen and paints a picture of a volatile period of
history but also poses questions about what we value in art.
*Books & Publishing*
A tremendous book written with such brilliance, honesty, humour and
wisdom. I loved the hybrid writing throughout and the way Funder
weaves the personal and the political and the literary to bring
Eileen to life, filling in the gaps that history, which is often
his-story, has systematically forgotten.
*Guardian*
A bravura analysis of female invisibility
*New York Times Notable Books of 2023*
A brilliant hybrid of biography, memoir and literary detective
work, which demonstrates how patriarchy allows men to exploit
women's unpaid services. Funder brings Eileen to life through her
letters, supported by forensic re-reading of male-authored
biographies and Orwell's classics about tyranny and truth.
*Guardian*
A moving biography with the pacing of a novel.
*Times Summer Reads*
Full of keen psychological insight and eloquent prose, WIFEDOM
shines
*Publishers Weekly*
Wifedom is both an immovable and an irresistible book, an object
and a force . . . another great and important narrative of
oppression and covert suppression.
*Australian Book Review*
Funder, author of Stasiland, her prizewinning account of the East
German secret police, takes six letters written by Eileen
O’Shaughnessy, George Orwell’s first wife, as the imaginative
springboard for a deep dive into their relationship and her impact
on his writing and legacy. A haunting, tragic and revealing
book
*Financial Times, Best Books of 2023*
It's hard to think of many other contemporary writers with such an
acute eye for writing into the absences in the historical
record.
*Saturday Paper*
George Orwell's first wife emerges vividly from Anna Funder's new
book . . . welcome and necessary, returning life to a woman who was
gifted, vivid, complex and highly intelligent, who gave up her own
ambitions in the furtherance of her husband's
*Weekend Australian*
Funder is the perfect writer to integrate Orwell's legacy. She,
too, has devoted her writing life to the subject of surviving
tyranny.
*The Conversation*
'Anna Funder 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 for their
graceful contours and crafted precision'
*i Newspaper*
Audaciously brilliant
*Independent*
A genre-bending tour de force... After Funder, we will never look
at this writer or his work in the same way again. Nor should
we.
*Independent*
This study of George Orwell’s first wife, Eileen – whom his books
never name – is fresh, original and immersive, thanks to the
award-winning author of Stasiland.
*Daily Telegraph 50 Best Books of the Year*
Electrifying... a genre-melding hybrid that allows Eileen's
likeness to be partially recovered through her own words and the
testimonies of those who remembered her, as well as reimagined in
fictional passages to flesh out the gaps in the record... Wifedom
is a vital portrait of a woman whose unseen work was instrumental
in the creation of books that became cornerstones of 20th century
literature, the extent of her contribution impossible to measure,
obscured as it is by the role of "wife"
*Observer*
In this rattlingly fierce book, Anna Funder sets out to unmask the
"wicked magic trick" by which Eileen O'Shaughnessy Blair has been
made to disappear... readers will be simply thrilled - and shaken -
by this passionately partisan act of literary reparation
*Sunday Times*
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