Six months after their wedding, Eileen and George Orwell stay with his family in Southwold. Eileen fidgets while trying to decide where to start on her letter to her friend Norah, irritating Orwell. In the letter, Eileen writes that she and Orwell had a rough start to their marriage, often arguing because Orwell felt that Eileen kept him from work.

Although Eileen believes that she and Orwell are similar in temperament, she worries that she is wasting her potential and her education by filling the role of a housewife. She dreads returning to the cottage and avoids writing that Orwell will soon go to fight in Spain. Instead, she describes Orwell’s family. Before leaving to walk on the pier with her sister-in-law, Avril, she jots down the bitter observation that whenever she leaves or plans to leave, Orwell gets ill in order to keep her at home.

Anna Funder shifts to her own point of view, dramatizing the moment in which this writing project first captivated her.

On a summer afternoon at a particularly hectic time in her life, she reads a newly purchased collection of George Orwell’s essays. His defense of individuality and independence in middle adulthood calls Funder’s attention to her own slow loss of individuality under the weight of her career and her domestic responsibilities.