George Orwell wrote of "two great facts about women": "One was their incorrigible dirtiness and untidiness. The other was their terrible, devouring sexuality."

 A passage from a notebook, quoted in "George Orwell gets his comeuppance in a new book about his first wife/Anna Funder’s ‘Wifedom’ focuses on Orwell’s first wife, Eileen, beginning with her influence on the creation of 'Animal Farm'" (WaPo). The article is by Francine Prose.

“Wifedom” is part biography and part speculative fiction written in the present tense; it includes passages of dialogue and accounts of private thoughts and intimate moments that only the people involved could have recorded or witnessed. (“The sex is strange. Perfunctory. Or performative. It doesn’t seem to be an act of communication at all, or of passion.”)...

Added to the mix in “Wifedom” are hefty chunks of memoir in which Funder describes her domestic life: watching Brett M. Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation hearing with her son, explaining the #MeToo movement to her daughter and living with a husband whose thoughtfulness can’t fully compensate for the power imbalances inherent in a patriarchal system. “The patriarchy is too huge, and I too small or stupid, or just not up for the fight,” she writes. “Wifedom is a wicked magic trick we have learned to play on ourselves. I want to expose how it is done and so take its wicked, tricking power away.”

Francine Prose isn't buying all this:

Reading “Wifedom,” I felt a bit guilty for how often I thought of Orwell’s brilliant essay “Politics and the English Language,” in which he rails against the flaws — vagueness, imprecision, awkwardness, a reliance on jargon and cliché — that plague “Wifedom.” Many passages left me wondering what Funder was trying to say: “The first task of the imagination, for the writer, is the creation of the writing self. It’s quite a job, and it helps to have two of you at it: she, believing in you, so you, too, believe in yourself. This nurtured self is then mother to the work. And the work, in turn, becomes evidence of a self: I made, therefore I am.”

The WaPo readers aren't buying it either. Top-rated comment:

Mixing actual historical events and conversations with speculative fiction is incredibly misleading for readers. I can't stand this type of writing because it leaves the reader unsure which parts actually transpired and which are completely made up. This is my biggest problem with movies that are based on historical events...but also take dramatic liberties. As viewers, the real and imagined become entwined and truth is lost.

You want to write a book that makes George Orwell look bad, sure. You want to throw in your own life and experiences, go for it. But don't make stuff up and throw it in the mix, too, because then we all lose.