#anna funder

She was brave and strong and broken all at once.

‘When I was first with the Stasi I was married, but we weren’t happy, and I fell in love with one of my son’s teachers. We began an affair. I confided in my best friend, but he turned out to have what you might call an overdeveloped sense of loyalty—and he told them at work. They locked me up in solitary for three days. Then they demoted me to working on a building site for a year. My supervisor said, “Anyone can have an affair, but everything must be reported.”’

Richard Rees, too, noted "an enormous change" that took place in Orwell's work in 1936 [the year Orwell married Eileen]. But he couldn't put cause and effect together to explain why his writing before marriage "did not have the grace and charm and humor that were to adorn so much of his later work". "There was such an extraordinary change in both his writing and his attitude," Rees said. "It was almost as if there'd been a kind of fire smouldering in him all his life which suddenly burst into flame at that time. But I can't understand it or explain exactly what happened; I just don't know."

Wifedom: Meet George Orwell's Wife Eileen

“We don't catch hold of an idea, rather the idea catches hold of us and enslaves us and whips us into the arena so that we, forced to be gladiators, fight for it.”