Anna Funder knew her 2023 book Wifedom would rattle cages. What surprised her was which cages. The Orwell Society — a charity run by George Orwell’s adopted son Richard Blair and his friend Quentin Kopp — pushed back against her portrait of Eileen Blair as the overlooked architect of Orwell’s literary legacy, even though, Funder says, they know every word is true.
The Australian author, recently appointed professor of practice in creative writing at Sydney University, is about to embark on a national speaking tour reflecting on three acclaimed works: Stasiland (2003), All That I Am (2011), and Wifedom (2023). Together they trace two decades of Funder’s obsession with how authoritarian regimes — and the biographers who chronicle them — erase the people who matter most.
From Berlin Wall to Stasi Archives
Funder was 20 when she landed in West Berlin in the late 1980s, surrounded by East German artists and writers the regime had expelled for dissent. A hundred metres away, on the other side of the Wall, sat their former lives — unreachable. That proximity to political rupture shaped everything she wrote next.
She returned to Australia, qualified as an international lawyer, and studied under Hilary Charlesworth, who later became the first Australian woman to serve on the International Court of Justice. But the pull of Berlin never left. After the Wall fell in 1989, Funder travelled back repeatedly on fellowships, investigating the country that had kicked out its best and brightest.
The breakthrough came with Miriam, a dissident whose husband died in Stasi custody and whose own story of resistance began at 16, when she protested the destruction of a Leipzig church in 1968. Funder bookends Stasiland with Miriam’s account. “I felt like I was getting up close to human courage and conscience in its purest and most extreme form,” Funder told ABC Arts. The book won the 2004 Samuel Johnson Prize, now known as the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction.
Why Fiction Waited Two Decades
Funder had always wanted to write a novel, but the Stasi stories demanded non-fiction. The regime was too extreme to be believable as fiction — Stasi officers really did collect dissidents’ dirty underwear in jars to train tracking dogs. The perpetrators were still walking around Berlin unpunished. “It seemed morally wrong to write a fiction out of stories that needed to be told in truth,” Funder said.
All That I Am, published in 2011, finally gave her that freedom. It tells the story of early resistance to Hitler — material that had never been fully documented. By the time Funder began writing in 2006, everyone involved was dead. She felt less beholden to living subjects and free to make them live again on the page. The novel won the 2012 Miles Franklin Literary Award.
Wifedom and the Eileen Blair Problem
Wifedom was the riskiest project yet — a hybrid of biography, memoir, fiction, and feminist literary analysis. Funder had no formal model. She had Eileen Blair’s letters to her Oxford best friend, used with permission, and she wanted Eileen to speak in her own voice rather than be spoken about.
The book documents how Orwell’s biographers systematically erased his wife — a brilliant, funny, feminist suffragette — along with the Fabian mother and aunt who shaped his underdog perspective. Funder also puts on the public record details the biographies had buried: Orwell’s repressed homosexuality, sadism, paranoia, and infidelities. “Somebody who was so vanilla could never have had the vision for Nineteen Eighty-Four,” Funder argues.
The blowback from the Orwell Society was immediate. Richard Blair acknowledges his mother likely had a far greater role in writing Animal Farm than she’s credited with, but the Society struggles to integrate a woman’s-eye view of a man they prefer to remember as decent and heterosexual. Funder sees this as exactly the kind of erasure Wifedom was written to expose.
What Happens Next
Funder’s national tour will revisit the through-line connecting her three books: how power hides itself, whether through secret police archives, historical amnesia, or literary biography. With her Sydney University appointment, she also joins a growing cohort of practising authors shaping how creative writing is taught in Australia. Expect the conversation to extend well beyond Orwell — Funder has flagged concerns about AI’s impact on authorship and what she sees as democratic backsliding across the West, themes that sit uncomfortably close to the totalitarian terrain she has spent her career mapping.
— Maya Singh, culture desk, AXO News