Leader:  Julie Griffin

At the end of the summer 2017, Annie Funder found herself at a moment of peak overload. Family obligations and household responsibilities were crushing her soul and taking her away from her writing deadlines. She needed help, and George Orwell came to her rescue. “I’ve always loved Orwell,” Funder writes,  “his self -deprecating humor, his laser vision about how power works, and who it works on.”  So after rereading and savoring books  Orwell had written, she devoured six major biographies, tracing his life and work. But then she read about his forgotten wife, and it was a revelation . Eileen Shaughnessy married Orwell in 1936. O’Shaughnessy was a writer herself, and her literary brilliance was not only shaped, but practical common sense saved his life. But how and why, wondered, was she written out of the story? Using newly discovered letters from Eileen to her best friend, under re-created the Orwell’s marriage, through the Spanish Civil War and the second world war in London. As she peaks  behind the curtain of Orwell’s private life, she is led to question what it takes to be a writer – and what it takes to be a wife. A breathtakingly intimate view of one of the most important literary marriages of the 20th century, Wifedom speaks to our present moment as much as it illuminates the past. Genre, vending, and utterly original, it is an ode to the unsung work of women everywhere. 

Thursday – Great Decisions will resume at 6:30 pm on August 21, 2015 at PCCF and via zoom.