Was Mrs. Orwell Memory-Holed?

For no particular reason—save, I suppose, his continued literary excellence—George Orwell is the flavor of the month right now. Earlier this year we had D.J. Taylor’s revisitation of his earlier biography of him in Orwell: The New Life, and now we have Anna Funder’s examination of Eileen O’Shaughnessy, Orwell’s first wife and, in Funder’s view, a brilliant woman and crucial influence on her husband’s life and work who has been unjustly airbrushed from history. As she writes early on, "She hasn’t really been in any of the biographies. Orwell’s biographers are seven men looking at a man."