I feel a bit bad about giving this 3 stars (we’ll round up to 3.5) but honestly, it just wasn’t that exciting of a read. I respect the decision to forI feel a bit bad about giving this 3 stars (we’ll round up to 3.5) but honestly, it just wasn’t that exciting of a read. I respect the decision to forego sensationalist reporting (even if it may sell more copies) and sticking with a more fact-based approach. However, with Brandreth writing the book with Prince Philip’s consent (mostly), along with his edits and corrections, you also begin to wonder if certain decisions are made not from a desire to understand the truth, but from the bias of the biographer being too close to his subject.
While he does go to exhaustive ends to clear up any rumors or misconceptions about Prince Philip’s philandering ways, it’s almost obsessive and a bit too repetitive. It’s like he never quite gets to the exact bottom of things and the irrefutable truth (again, it doesn’t make it easy that Philip was avowedly averse to journalists and any writings about his life) but still, the author always seems to come to the conclusion that would be most pleasing to the late Prince. Likely because he is a man who very much enjoys name-dropping (and admits as much!).
I did enjoy the book and getting to learn as much as Prince Philip would possibly allow us to learn about him, as well as his lovely relationship with the Queen.
It also gave me a greater understanding as to why the Royal Family behaves the way they do, and why they’re instinctively wary of anyone trying to marry into the family that views the position as something to help catapult them into stardom - rather than realizing that they’re there to serve the people, and the people love them simply because of their position, not because of individual traits (Wallis, Diana, Meghan, ahem).
I’m glad that the whole saga of Harry and Meghan was barely even mentioned, rather than to refer to the entire situation as “regrettable.”
I haven’t read a lot of books on royals, so this was a good one for me to start with. I just can’t imagine it contains much of anything new for those who already know much about Prince Philip. The author’s tendency to name drop (as mentioned earlier) definitely shows throughout the book.
Even in the most mundane of conversations, the author likes to mention how this and that was told to him personally by so-and-so. I didn’t always care to know exactly every single title bestowed upon each individual mentioned in the book, yet, that’s exactly what I got.
It does, however, provide some interesting insight into Diana and Charles’s marriage that I’d never heard before. It was nice to read both sides of the story for once. To see Diana as she was, rather than her do-no-wrong portrayal after death by the press and public alike.
Newsflash to Harry: The media didn’t kill your mother. Not wearing a seatbelt killed her. Not to sound unsympathetic or insensitive because it is a tragedy nonetheless. But let’s not kid ourselves. As Brandreth states succinctly: “The press used Diana and Diana used the press.”
Would I recommend? Probably not, unless again, you know very little about royalty, want to better understand their ways, and don’t mind that it’s a bit too long and a bit too repetitive....more
Most people have heard of Anna Funder thanks to her stalwart endeavor of disclosing previously unmentioned stories of former East Germany and the liveMost people have heard of Anna Funder thanks to her stalwart endeavor of disclosing previously unmentioned stories of former East Germany and the lives of those affected by the former's state's secret surveillance operatives - the Stasi. (It should be of no surprise, then, that she's exploring Orwell after exploring a totalitarian regime, and I highly recommend this book. I don't know if there's anything else like it out there. Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall ). She truly does bring a humane and compassionate sentiment to an otherwise very bleak and desolate tale.
It comes as no surprise that she does the same with her latest work, published over twenty years later, on what can perhaps only be characterized as "a fill-in-the-blank biography of Eileen O'Shaughnessy-Blair (Orwell), with ingenious observations serving as the filler."
Never heard the name? It's no surprise. I hadn't, either. After all, her only purported life's purpose (before Ms. Funder expertly brought her in as a lead actress) was to play a supporting role in not just furthering, but perhaps even creating her uber-famous literary husband's career. It's no surprise, either, given that all of George Orwell's former biographers have been men (nothing misandrist about that, it's just that no one wants to bash their literary hero - and men, given it doesn't affect them - will even be less reluctant to dive further into who he truly was). Upon finishing this book, I just said screw it and gave it five stars. I really can't think of any reason why it would deserve less.
Funder just raises so many essential questions as to a woman's place in the world. Of course, it's specifically in relation to Eileen's role as "George's wife" in the late 1930s and early 1940s, but it applies to just about every aspect of our being, from time eternal. At times, you become quite furious with Eileen for not leaving him - after all, she is from a well-to-do family and highly educated (graduated with her master's - I think in literature, but don't quote me on that - from Oxford). Her family and friends most definitely would have supported her in filing for a divorce from this man who treated her so cruelly.
Why furious? Because I thought there could at least be a plausible explanation for why she put up with his misogyny, his total disregard for her, his blatant affairs, and at best - her irrelevance to him, and at worst - her "value" in her servitude to him, continuously treated as some kind of pawn in his "sadistic" power games (not my words!).
Good luck in finding one, though. I know Funder herself ponders why Eileen didn't just leave him. You'd think, "well, maybe it was because they had children" (no) "people didn't divorce in those times" (mostly true, except that in their circle of highly educated friends, divorce wasn't common) or "she was afraid to." She had nothing to lose and everything to gain! I'm still beyond bewildered why she would so cheerfully play the part of his editor, his ghostwriter, his nurse, his lover, his servant - when she had so much going for her. She could have easily embarked on her own writing career. Her brother was a great surgeon, married to a female surgeon. But to stay with someone so awful and dismissive, someone so "simple" (by accounts of nearly all who knew him) when she could have left? I don't know. Of course I pity her, but I can't help but feel incredibly frustrated as well.
Want to know some of Orwell's lovely opinions on women?
"Women disgust him; he disgusts himself. He's paranoid, feeling he's been tricked by a politico-sexual conspiracy of filthy women 'imposing' a false 'picture of themselves' on the world. He sees women - as wives - in terms of what they do for him, or 'demand' of him. Not enough cleaning; too much sex. How was it then, for her? My first guess: too much cleaning and not enough, or not good enough, sex."
It was said that Eileen "loved Orwell deeply, but with a tender amusement - she noted his extraordinary political simplicity - which seems to have worried one of the biographers, who rewrote her words to give him an 'extraordinary political sympathy' instead. And she objected to him being called 'Saint George' on the grounds of his wizened, Christlike face. It was merely due, she said, to him having one or two teeth missing."
It's outrageous that a biographer could turn "extraordinary political simplicity" to "sympathy" instead. And more importantly, why?! I'm not saying it was their duty to include that information in the biography, but if it's that problematic, omit it. Don't change the words so drastically that it just looks imbecilic. Orwell does it himself, but so do his biographers - he omits her importance from every story he writes. Even (especially) when she is at the center of the action.
It was EILEEN who worked for a counterrevolutionary group in Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War (no wonder the reviews of Homage to Catalonia all seem to mention how misinformed or bland the story really is). EILEEN'S life was the most in danger from the Stalinists, and EILEEN worked for a "Ministry of Truth" building in the UK - censoring news about the war from the public eye. EILEEN wanted a child and was perfectly healthy; Orwell was sterile. EILEEN wanted a loving and close marriage, not an open one. George only loved women as objects he sought to possess.
This is likely the most-quoted sentence of the book, and with good reason: "One person's time to work is created by another person's work in time: the more time he has to work, the more she is working to make it for him." It's astonishing to me that Orwell claimed to be so set on class equality, in freedom from policing thought and any kind of society that limits free will - well, except of course when it applies to half the world's population, anyway.
I'll try to wrap it up, because I know I could go on forever. It's difficult to review this book, really. It's so different from anything else I've read, and if my review is really that all over the place, that's the reason!
She does an excellent job of finding the "hidden methods" used by writers and biographers alike to leave women out of any main roles, in attentively searching for the passive voice. She states that what Orwell does has two purposes: "The first is to make what she does disappear (so he can appear to have done it all, alone). The second is to make what he does to a woman disappear (so he can be innocent). This trick is the dark, doublethinking heart of patriarchy." YES! Gotta love her using his own critique against him (if the word truly was his invention, that is).
Funder actually started on the project because she wanted more information on Orwell himself - possibly to do a biography of her own. She admits to always being inspired by his work, and how his books have always "gotten her out of a slump" in the past. She doesn't long to "cancel" him - but she does long to show what has been omitted about HIM. Even if men don't find it problematic that he was misogynistic and had multiple affairs (and I guess you'd have to hate most of your literary heroes if you hated every male from those times guilty of extramarital relations) - it should certainly be problematic that he completely ignored her when she was undergoing critical, life-threatening surgery. He was more concerned with trying to sleep with her best friends. Seriously.
And to no one's shock - he's not even there when she dies. She can't even find a way to ask him to "permission" to pay for her medical bills (when she's the primary breadwinner - AND, his medical treatment has come so inexpensive thanks to her brother's help) nor can she think of any way to ask him to come see her in the hospital before this surgery ultimately kills her, because she knows he is "disgusted by hospitals and sick wards."
I've spoken enough about it. Read this book! Read it so that you too can read behind the lines along with Anna. She truly performs the feat of a magician by making an invisible woman not just suddenly appear, but appear with a dramatic burst of liveliness and character - one that so enriched the lives of all those lucky enough to know her.
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