Hello, hello and welcome to this week's Sunday Chops, it's Mickey and the Wheels of Steel.

And by that, I mean introducing you to this chat I had with the incredible Anna Funder,

author of a book you should all read immediately if not sooner.

Lifedham, Mrs. Orwell's Invisible Life, is ostensibly a biography of Eileen Blair,

nay Eileen O'Shaughnessy, aka the First Mrs. George Orwell.

And indeed Anna tells Eileen's story beautifully using Eileen's own words from letters to

friends and to her husband, with added judicious fiction, as Anna imagines scenes from the Orwell's

lives, and from Eileen's life.

It becomes clear that Eileen played a vital role in Orwell's writing and in his life,

in saving his life, and indeed in keeping alive many others, and yet she's mostly absent

from Orwell's own writing and from his biographies, which, and you know, get your surprise face

ready here, are all written by men.

And so, Lifedham is also a polemic against the patriarchy, and an examination of what it

means to be, or certainly what is expected of, a wife.

Any writer could fall into the gap between what a reader imagines of them and who they

think they are, and a woman might live there.

So writes Anna on Eileen, and countless other women behind, very much an invert, who

commas great male writers.

Anna and I chat about this, about wifeing, about Eileen, about Orwell, and not unrelated

to that last name, quite a lot about our souls.

Now Anna's not on Twitter, but you can find her on Instagram at Anna's Thunder author,

and immediately after chatting with her, about wifedom, I bought Starzyland to read on

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