Wifedom: Mrs Orwell's Invisible Life, which tells of the struggles of the 1984 author's wife Eileen O'Shaughnessy, was published in August.

Before he assumed the pen name George Orwell, Eric Arthur Blair (June 25, 1903-January 21, 1950) had a relatively normal upbringing for an upper-middle-class English boy of his time. Looking back ...

George Orwell was a “sadistic, misogynistic, homophobic, sometimes violent” man who wrote women out of his story, according to a biographer of his wife. Anna Funder said that Orwell was a ...

FEW WRITERS have achieved the cult status of George Orwell. He is so much a part of the collective imagination that John Rodden, an Orwell scholar, goes so far as to call him “the most important ...

The Ministry of Truth: The Biography of George Orwell’s 1984, by the British music critic Dorian Lynskey, makes a rich and compelling case for the novel as the summation of Orwell’s entire ...

Eileen married Orwell in 1936, and nine years later, at 39, she became ill with cancer. Demoralized by illness and by Orwell’s infidelities, nastiness and neglect (according to Funder), she ...

DJ Taylor published Orwell: The Lifein 2003. Now he offers a new biography that draws upon new materials that have surfaced since (Orwell’s letters to women he was infatuated with, for instance).

WIFEDOM: Mrs. Orwell’s Invisible Life. By Anna Funder. Knopf. 464 pages. $32. Throughout my reading life, I have returned to George Orwell’s work for the pleasure and power of his words and ...