Wifedom: Mrs. Orwell's Invisible Life

Meanwhile, Eileen is stuck in England, wanting to help in the fight in Spain. Eileen asks Orwell’s Aunt Nellie, who is fresh from a breakup, to come look after the cottage while Eileen joins Orwell. After Aunt Nellie arrives, Eileen goes to London to her brother’s flat. She writes to Norah about her impending trip and her volunteer employment as a secretary to John McNair as a representative of the ILP (Independent Labor Party). She tells Norah that she will be in Barcelona within a couple of days and will stay in the Continental hotel there as long as the money holds out.

After Eileen arrives in Barcelona, she works for the revolution and compiles Orwell’s handwritten observations from the front. She does her best to send him little luxuries whenever possible. Funder notes that although Orwell writes extensively of his experience in Spain, Eileen is only given a mere footnote in Homage to Catalonia. Similarly, Orwell’s biographers barely mention the fact that Eileen was in Spain during the revolution.

Intrigued by what Eileen did beyond serving Orwell, Funder travels to Barcelona. She tours Catalonia with Eileen and Orwell’s adopted son, Richard Blair, and with Quentin Kopp; they both cooperatively head the Orwell Society. Funder visits the sites of various battles and becomes emotionally aware of the fact that the country was ruled by the fascist Franco for nearly 40 years.

Eileen arrives in Barcelona and goes to the ILP offices to meet McNair. She quickly becomes integral to ILP operations. In addition to completing basic secretarial work, she facilitates creature comforts and medical supplies to the soldiers at the front. To accomplish the delivery of medical supplies, she convinces Gwen to drive them from London to Barcelona, accompanied by volunteer David Wicks—a spy for Stalin. She also assists Americans Charles and Lois Orr in creating English-language propaganda that touts the successes of the ILP and POUM efforts. Additionally, Eileen spends a great deal of her own money in support of the ILP and its members, including McNair himself. Orr remarks on Eileen’s excellence and the fact that her love for Orwell convinced Orr of Orwell’s own worth. As Orr observes, “A man who could win a woman of such quality must have some value” (120).

Georges Kopp is the main source of supply transportation from Barcelona to the front. He falls in love with Eileen and attempts to get her to marry him, but she refuses, saying in a letter that she could never leave Orwell. Eileen, Lois, and Charles Orr are targeted by the spies Giorgio Tioli and David Wicks, among others. When Eileen writes home to her mother, she describes the experience of the bombings of Barcelona as charming and fun rather than terrifying.

She travels with Kopp to the front, finding herself excited by the action. She spends part of the night with Orwell and leaves with Kopp in the dark. When she arrives in Barcelona, she is pulled away from her hotel by John McNair. He tells her that he was arrested and held overnight by the local police, likely in service of Stalin. He asks her to run the office while he hides out in Paris for a week.

Richard Rees, the owner of the socialist bookshop at which Orwell once worked, arrives in Barcelona, ready to join the fight for socialism. He finds Eileen acting strangely. She finds a private space to tell him that she is being spied on and does not want him to be in danger. Orwell returns to Barcelona and sees that the revolutionary spirit seems to have vanished as quickly as it was established. Orwell and Eileen share a meal with Tioli, who brings David Crook, another spy, to Eileen’s office the next day, where he quickly establishes himself. Orwell is frustrated at the lack of action at Huesca and decides to join the communist faction in Madrid instead. Eileen goes with him to the recruiter, and the truth she shares grants Orwell a position at the front and lands her a job as well.

Orwell encounters a rain of bullets in the street on his way back to the Continental hotel. He runs to another hotel to take cover and spends the night in an abandoned theater. He calls John McNair the next day and discovers that Eileen experienced an attack on her offices the day before but has not been shot.

Funder focuses on the glaring absence of Eileen in Orwell’s narration of these events. She argues that to include Eileen, Orwell would have to highlight his own inadequacies; she posits that he chooses to omit her bold actions from his account in order to further his own self-image.

Funder dramatizes Eileen’s experience of the attack on the building where the ILP office was located.

When Eileen hears the shots, it takes her a moment to identify the sound. McNair rushes in and tells her about the attack. She looks around the office and identifies what needs to be smuggled out. She packs passports, maps, books, other documents, and the typewriter, wrapping everything in brown paper and placing it all in a shopping cart and additional bags. She calls her colleagues for assistance, and Tioli helps her to smuggle the items back to the hotel.

Eileen finds Lois in the lounge. They order dinner, and Lois asks after Orwell. Eileen says that he is likely looking for action. After a worried night in which she hears nothing from Orwell, she wakes to the sound of more gunfire and realizes that her offices are under siege. Meanwhile, Orwell makes his way back to the Continental, buying coffee and cheese on the way. He sees that the executive offices are under attack, and after stopping at the hotel to check on Eileen, he reports to the office for orders.

Kopp takes command and faces the Assault Guard to negotiate a temporary ceasefire. Orwell stands guard for three days on the opposite rooftop. In his own account, his only mention of Eileen is when he says that she has come to be a nurse, as they believe that there will be a full-scale attack. Funder argues that Eileen was likely in the office because she worked there and might have had responsibilities there.

Assault Guards flood the city the next day, creating an atmosphere of suspicion and fear. The script has been adjusted to paint the ILP as traitors to the cause who are working with Franco. Orwell flees back to the front with his company, taking a new name with no problematic associations and leaving Eileen behind. She writes to Norah, making light of the fighting and the fear.

Orwell is shot in the neck at the front, and because he believes he is dying, he asks the stretcher bearers to tell Eileen that he loves her. He is transferred from hospital to hospital until he is placed outside of Barcelona. His writing indicates that Eileen was still at the Continental at this time, but Funder explains that Eileen went immediately to the front and stayed by his side the entire time. She arranged for the transfers and contacted her brother, who helped to organize Orwell’s care.

The aura of suspicion intensifies in Barcelona. When Orwell arrives, Eileen has figured out that Wickes is likely a spy, and she also suspects Crook and Tioli as well. She warns Orwell, who returns to the front to get a formal discharge. This task takes him several days, and in the meantime, she prepares to help the ILP soldiers out of Spain so that they can arrest. She hides the passports in the mattress, concealed in the springs. She eats with Lois, and they are joined by Tioli, who asks what they would want brought to them in prison. Lois says peaches, Eileen says a toothbrush.

Funder imagines the preparations that Eileen and her colleagues made in the knowledge that warrants had been issued for their arrests.

Eileen, Crook, McNair, and Charles Orr meet in her hotel room. Eileen gives McNair the manuscript that she has been typing for Orwell, insisting that she will stay until Orwell returns to Barcelona. McNair tells them that he and the boy who has been helping them will hide out that night in a lodge and then flee the country. Charles tells Eileen that he will leave for America with Lois in a couple of days, and he begs her to save herself. Crook offers to stay, reporting to the end.

McNair is paranoid that night. He shreds the maps and documents he has with him, except for Orwell’s manuscript. When the guards rush in and search his room, he plays the part of a confused Brit and explains the presence of the manuscript by claiming that he is doing a favor for a writer. Kopp, Crook, and the Orrs are all arrested in the hotel and taken to secret makeshift prisons. Lois and Charles are rescued by a Kentucky senator who knew Lois personally and intervenes on her behalf. However, while they are in custody, the American consul brings a gift for Lois: peaches. This gift indicates that Tioli knows where they are being held. Eileen is left alone in Barcelona, waiting for Orwell.

Eileen’s room is searched. The searchers turn the room inside out, but she stays on the bed the whole time, so they fail to discover the passports. She waits in the hotel for Orwell to return. When he walks in, she walks up to him and whispers in his ear, telling him to leave immediately. They find a private café where she tells him about the arrests and the search. She insists that he hide out with McNair for a few days while she arranges their passports. Orwell describes her walking him out of the hotel and details the raid on their room, but he never mentions that she assumes all the risk by arranging the passports.

While they wait, Eileen and Orwell take a serious risk and visit Kopp. He tells them that he may be saved by a commander’s request to have his expertise at the eastern front, but the order has been confiscated. Orwell rushes to the Police Prefect—the same place that Eileen had to visit for the passports—to attempt to get it back, but he fails. While he goes on this risky mission, Kopp again proposes marriage to Eileen, and she stays silent. He writes a letter to her when he believes that he will be executed. Crook takes this letter and keeps it in a file in Moscow, though Kopp made a copy that Eileen likely destroyed.

Eileen, Orwell, Cottman, and McNair escape Barcelona on the train. Although they are checked at the French border against the warrant list, the police are inefficient, and their names aren’t there. Eileen and Orwell safely return to England, although there was an indictment naming both as traitors to the Stalinist cause. Had they been caught, they likely would have been killed.

Orwell’s description of their escape uses the words “my wife” many times but never mentions Eileen by name. While in Spain, Funder goes back to all the places that the couple went. She imagines Eileen on the balcony of the hotel, laughing as Orwell conceals his rifle to get back to the hotel.