EILEEN SYLVIA TOPP
THE MAKING OF GEORGE ORWELL
Unbound, 495pp, £25
Eileen O’shaughnessy was 30 when she married Orwell in 1936, and embarked on a life of domestic slavery in a remote cottage in Hertfordshire. When Orwell went to Spain the next year, she followed him; both had affairs but they stayed together. When he started work on
Animal Farm Eileen typed the manuscript, and covered the back of each page with suggestions. John Carey in the Sunday Times was persuaded by Topp’s suggestion that the novel was ‘almost a joint production’. But in 1945, before the novel was published and just after adopting a son, Eileen went into hospital for a hysterectomy and died under anaesthetic. Orwell had always been the sick one, but she was sicker. To Carey the book was ‘a revelation, because it sees things from Eileen’s point of view and shows that Orwell persistently failed to do so’.
Rachel Cooke in the Guardian complained that Topp neither makes the case for Eileen’s importance to Orwell, nor renders her interesting in her own right. But Ysenda Maxtone Graham in the Daily Mail found it a compelling portrait of a marriage, and felt after reading that she had been ‘living in a damp, cold, mouseinfested cottage’ with sore fingers from typing up the husband’s manuscripts ‘while he coughs all over me, a perpetual drip on the end of his nose, his infected TB breath imbuing the place with a sickly-sweet odour... there’s so much illness in this book that you feel the very pages are contagious.’
The book was ‘a revelation, because it sees things from Eileen’s point of view’