Funder is on a tightrope here balancing precariously between her love of Orwell's writings and her misgivings about the way he lived his life, especially with regard to women and his wife, Eileen O'Shaughnessy.

As part of her exploration, Funder looks at the way Orwell's previous biographers have made implicit excuses for Orwell, using the passive tense to write out things that Eileen did. She also points to the way the 'standard' story is that the Orwells had an 'open' marriage or, at least, that Eileen didn't mind all his affairs - Funder finds no evidence for either position and, instead, quotes letters showing Eileen's hurt. It's especially uncomfortable to hear Orwell, in his own words, talk about 'pouncing on' secretaries and other young women with whom he comes into contact, not occasionally but as a generalised way of being a man in the world.

It's important to say that this isn't a book which is trashing Orwell: but it is wonderfully ironic that Funder uses his own analysis of doublethink, that ability to hold two contradictory positions in one's mind at the same time and find them both acceptable and 'true', to illuminate how Orwell considered women. He exposes political tyranny but gives the systemic oppressions of patriarchy a free rein in his everyday life.

Whether he is buying girl prostitutes in Burma where he's a colonial policeman, living off Eileen's hard-won earnings while he writes, eating all the butter rations during the war because he has no idea how much a ration portion is leaving her with dry bread, or dumping her with a court case for adoption of their son while he flits off to Europe and she is in the last stages of the uterine cancer which kills her, this is a story of private selfishness supported by patriarchal norms of masculinity.

Based on letters that Eileen wrote to a friend which have fairly recently come into the public domain, this is an interesting engagement with the perennial question of how we deal with artists whose work we respect, even revere, but whose personal lives are messy, even 'indecent'. To Funder's credit, she doesn't try to simplify this question and offers up the other side of Eileen's story.

I felt that this book can feel a little slight at times and the personal anecdotes from Funder's own life didn't add anything to my reading. It's also the case that the narrative continues on past Eileen's life thus making her part of Orwell's more general story which is rather counter to its stated agenda. Still, it's an interesting approach to recuperating a female life that has been over-written by her more famous husband.