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“My starting point is always a feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice. When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to produce a work of art’. I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing. But I could not do the work of writing a book, or even a long magazine article, if it were not also an aesthetic experience.”

George Orwell,  Why I Write

George Orwell was born Eric Blair in India in 1903 into a comfortable ‘lower-upper-middle class’ family. Orwell’s father had served the British Empire, and Orwell’s own first job was as a policeman in Burma. Orwell wrote in “Shooting an Elephant” (1936) that his time in the police force had shown him the “dirty work of Empire at close quarters”; the experience made him a lifelong foe of imperialism.

By the time of his death in 1950, he was world-renowned as a journalist and author: for his eyewitness reporting on war (shot in the neck in Spain ) and poverty ( tramping in London, washing dishes in Paris or visiting pits and the poor in Wigan ); for his political and cultural commentary , where he stood up to power and said the unsayable ( ‘If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear’ ); and for his fiction, including two of the most popular novels ever written: Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four .

The Orwell Foundation maintains a wealth of Orwell resources, free to access online, from Orwell’s  essays  and  diaries , to a library of work about Orwell and his writing. Read on for an extended biography written by D.J. Taylor. Taylor is an author, journalist and critic. His Biography of Orwell,  Orwell: the Life won the 2003 Whitbread Biography Award.

As part of our wider commitment to promote knowledge and understanding of Orwell’s life and work, the Foundation also regularly releases new short educational films. These are free to access on YouTube and include contributions from Orwell’s son Richard Blair, D. J. Taylor, and previous winners of the Orwell Prizes:

• The Night Orwell Died
• George Orwell and the Battle for Animal Farm
• ‘Some Thoughts on the Common Toad’: 75th anniversary film

The Orwell Foundation is an independent charity – please consider making a donation or becoming a Friend of the Foundation to support our work and maintain these resources for readers everywhere. 

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• The Orwell Society, an independent, worldwide membership society
• UCL Archives: Orwell Archive
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7 Facts About George Orwell

His real name is Eric Blair

As a child, Orwell yearned to become a famous author, but he intended to publish as E.A. Blair, not his birth name, Eric Blair (he didn't feel the name Eric was suitable for a writer). However, when his first book came out — Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) — a complete pseudonym was necessary (he felt his family wouldn't appreciate the public knowing their Eton-educated son had worked as a dishwasher and lived as a tramp).

Orwell provided his publisher with a list of potential pseudonyms. In addition to George Orwell, which was his preference, the other choices were: P.S. Burton, Kenneth Miles and H. Lewis Allways.

He was spied on during the Spanish Civil War

Orwell not only wrote about state surveillance, but he also experienced it. Biographer Gordon Bowker found the Soviet Union had an undercover agent spying on Orwell and other leftists while they were fighting in the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s. Secret police in Spain also seized diaries Orwell had made while in the country and probably passed them to the NKVD (predecessor to the KGB).

In addition, his own government kept track of Orwell (a fact he was likely unaware of). This began in 1929 when he volunteered to write for a left-wing publication in France. The police also paid attention when Orwell visited coal miners in 1936 while gathering information for The Road to Wigan Pier (1937). In 1942, a police sergeant reported to MI5 that Orwell had "advanced communist views" and dressed "in a bohemian fashion, both at his office and in his leisure hours." Fortunately, the MI5 case officer actually knew Orwell's work and that "he does not hold with the Communist Party nor they with him.

He had difficulties publishing 'Animal Farm'

Financial and popular success eluded Orwell until Animal Farm , his allegorical look at the Russian Revolution and its aftermath. But despite the book's quality, in 1944 Orwell encountered trouble while trying to get it published. Some didn't seem to understand it: T.S. Eliot , a director of publisher Faber and Faber, noted, "Your pigs are far more intelligent than the other animals, and therefore the best qualified to run the farm." Victor Gollancz, who'd published much of Orwell's earlier work, was loath to criticize the Soviet Union and Joseph Stalin .

Publisher Jonathan Cape almost took on the book, but the Ministry of Information advised against antagonizing the Soviet Union, an ally in World War II (however, the official who gave this warning was later discovered to be a Soviet spy). With rejections accumulating, Orwell even considered self-publishing before Animal Farm was accepted by Fredric Warburg's small press. The success that followed the book's 1945 release probably had some publishers regretting their earlier refusals.

Ernest Hemingway gave him a gun

During the Spanish Civil War, Stalinists turned on POUM, the left-wing group Orwell fought with. This led to POUM members being arrested, tortured and even killed. Orwell escaped Spain before he was taken into custody — but when he traveled to Paris in 1945 to work as a correspondent, he felt he could still be in danger from Communists who were targeting their enemies.

A gun could offer protection, but as a civilian Orwell couldn't easily acquire one. His solution was to turn to Ernest Hemingway . Orwell visited Hemingway at the Ritz and explained his fears. Hemingway, who admired Orwell's writing, handed over a Colt .32. It's unknown if Orwell ever had to use the weapon.

He was friends with Aldous Huxley

Before Orwell wrote 1984 (1949) and Aldous Huxley penned Brave New World (1932), the two met at Eton, where Huxley taught French. While some students took advantage of and mocked Huxley's poor eyesight, Orwell reportedly stood up for him and enjoyed having Huxley as a teacher.

Orwell and Huxley also read each other's most famous work. Writing in Time and Tide in 1940, Orwell called Brave New World "a good caricature of the hedonistic Utopia" but said "it had no relation to the actual future," which he envisaged as "something more like the Spanish Inquisition." In 1949, Huxley sent Orwell a letter with his take on 1984. Though he admired it, he felt "the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience."

He sent the government a list of people he thought were communist sympathizers

On May 2, 1949, Orwell sent a list of names to a friend at the Foreign Office whose job was to fight Soviet propaganda. The 35 names were people he suspected of being communist sympathizers. Orwell noted in his letter, ''It isn't a bad idea to have the people who are probably unreliable listed." He also wrote, "Even as it stands I imagine that this list is very libelous, or slanderous, or whatever the term is, so will you please see that it is returned to me without fail."

Orwell wanted Britain to survive the threat of totalitarianism, and almost certainly felt he was helping that cause. However, it's still surprising that the man who came up with the concept of Big Brother felt comfortable providing the government with a list of suspect names.

He died from tuberculosis

When Orwell's tuberculosis worsened in the 1940s, a cure existed: the antibiotic streptomycin, which had been on in the market in America since 1946. However, streptomycin wasn't readily available in post-war Great Britain.

Given his connections and success, Orwell was able to obtain the drug in 1948 but experienced a severe allergic reaction to it: hair falling out, disintegrating nails and painful throat ulcerations, among other symptoms. His doctors, new to the drug, didn't know a lower dosage likely could have saved him without the horrible side effects; instead, Orwell ceased treatment (the remainder was given to two other TB patients, who recovered). He tried streptomycin once more in 1949 but still couldn't tolerate it. Orwell succumbed to TB on January 21, 1950.

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George Orwell

• Literature Notes
• George Orwell Biography
• 1984 at a Glance
• Book Summary
• Character List
• Summary and Analysis
• Part 1: Chapter 1
• Part 1: Chapter 2
• Part 1: Chapter 3
• Part 1: Chapter 4
• Part 1: Chapter 5
• Part 1: Chapters 6-7
• Part 1: Chapter 8
• Part 2: Chapter 1
• Part 2: Chapters 2-3
• Part 2: Chapter 4
• Part 2: Chapters 5-6
• Part 2: Chapters 7-8
• Part 2: Chapters 9-10
• Part 3: Chapter 1
• Part 3: Chapters 2-3
• Part 3: Chapters 4-5
• Part 3: Chapter 6
• Part 3: Appendix
• Character Analysis
• Winston Smith
• Big Brother and Emmanuel Goldstein
• Character Map
• Critical Essays
• The Role of Language and the Act of Writing
• The Purpose of Newspeak
• The Role of the Author
• The Mutability of History
• Full Glossary
• Essay Questions
• Practice Projects
• Cite this Literature Note

Early Years

George Orwell is the pen name of Eric Arthur Blair, born in 1903 in Motihari, Bengal, India, during the time of the British colonial rule. Young Orwell was brought to England by his mother and educated in Henley and Sussex at schools.

The Orwell family was not wealthy, and, in reading Orwell's personal essays about his childhood, readers can easily see that his formative years were less than satisfying. However, the young Orwell had a gift for writing, which he recognized at the age of just five or six. Orwell's first published work, the poem "Awake Young Men of England," was printed in the Henley and South Oxfordshire Standard when he was eleven years old.

Orwell attended Eton College. Because literature was not an accepted subject for boys at the time, Orwell studied the master writers and began to develop his own writing style. At Eton, he came into contact with liberalist and socialist ideals, and it was here that his initial political views were formed.

Adult Years

Orwell moved to Burma in 1922, where he served as an Assistant Superintendent of Police for five years before he resigned because of his growing dislike for British Imperialism. In 1928, Orwell moved to Paris and began a series of low paying jobs. In 1929, he moved to London, again living in what he termed "fairly severe poverty." These experiences provided the material for his first novel, Down and Out in Paris and London, which he placed with a publisher in 1933.

About this time, while Orwell was teaching in a small private school in Middlesex, he came down with his first bout of pneumonia due to tuberculosis, a condition would plague him throughout his life and require hospitalization again in 1938, 1947, and 1950.

In 1933, Orwell gave up teaching and spent almost a year in Southwold writing his next book, Burmese Days. During this time, he worked part time in a bookshop, where he met his future wife, Eileen O'Shaughnessy. He and Eileen were he married in 1936, shortly before he moved to Spain to write newspaper articles about the Spanish Civil War.

In Spain, Orwell found what he had been searching for — a true socialist state. He joined the struggle against the Fascist party but had to flee when the group with which he was associated was falsely accused of secretly helping the Fascists.

By 1939, Orwell had returned to England. In 1941, he took a position with the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) as the person in charge of broadcasting to India and Southeast Asia. Orwell disliked this job immensely, being, as he was, in charge of disseminating propaganda to these British colonies — an act that went against both his nature and his political philosophy. In 1943, Orwell took a job more to his liking, as the literary editor of The Tribune.

Shortly after Orwell and Eileen adopted a son in 1944, Orwell became a war correspondent for the Observer in Paris and Cologne, Germany. Tragically, Eileen died in the beginning of that year, just before the publication of one of his most important novels, Animal Farm . Despite the loss of his wife and his own battle with poor health, Orwell continued his writing and completed the revision of 1984 in 1948. It was published early the next year with great success.

Orwell remarried in 1949 to Sonia Brownell, only a year before his own death of tuberculosis. He is buried in the churchyard of All Saints, Sutton Courtenay, Berkshire.

Literary Writing

Orwell's writing career spanned nearly seventeen years. Ironically, although Orwell didn't consider himself a novelist, he wrote two of the most important literary masterpieces of the 20th century: Animal Farm and 1984 . While these are the most famous novels of his career, his memoirs, other novels, and essential work as an essayist all contribute to the body of work that makes up important twentieth century literature.

In Orwell's writing, he sought truth. Even his fiction has elements of the world around him, of the wars and struggles that he witnessed, of the terrible nature of politics, and the terrible toll that totalitarianism takes on the human spirit. From the time he began to write at the age of twenty-four, Orwell longed to capture the struggles of "real" people, to live among the less fortunate, and to tell their stories. Of his own writing, Orwell has said that he writes because there is some kind of lie that he has to expose, some fact to which he wants to draw attention. Orwell certainly does this in 1984, a novel fraught with political purpose, meaning, and warning.

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FAMOUS AUTHORS

George Orwell

George Orwell, particularly known as a novelist was an avid follower of politics who voiced his intense dislike against totalitarianism through his most famed works Animal farm (1945) and 1984 (1949). These two novels are the main contributions to Orwell’s esteemed reputation as an exceptional writer. However, during the course of his career, Orwell was recognized for his remarkable journalism and essays that seem to be written for modern times years ago. The famously brilliant six rules for writers by George Orwell are used even today as a basic key to better writing by writers all over the world.

Born on June 25, 1903, Eric Arthur Blair who later decided on George Orwell as his pen name was the second child of British parents Richard Walmesly Blair and Ida Mabel Limonzin who then resided in Indian Bengal where Richard was an employee of the British Civil Services. Blair was an outstanding student. He attended reputable educational institutions such as the St Cyprian’s School, Wellington College and Eton College on scholarships. When Blair did not obtain a scholarship to continue studies at a university, he joined the Indian Imperial Army in Burma but resigned a few years later with immense hatred for imperialism. His experiences in Burma were translated into writing in his first novel, Burmese Days (1934) and essays such as A Hanging and Shooting an Elephant. Similarly Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) was an account of his life in poverty after leaving Burma.

Later Orwell volunteered to fight in the Spanish Civil War for the Republicans where he was shot in the neck and had to flee for his life. During the World War II till 1940 Orwell wrote book reviews in the New English Weekly for a living. He also worked for the BBC Eastern Service. Orwell married Eileen O’Shaughnessy sometime during 1936 and 1945. They adopted a son, Richard Horatio Blair. When Eileen died in 1949, Orwell married Sonia Brownell.

During the 1930s Orwell published novels included A Clergyman’s Daughter (1935), Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936), and Coming Up for Air (1939) along with two insightful documentaries The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) which is about the lives of poor miners in Lancashire, Wigan and Homage to Catalonia (1938), an account of his experiences during The Spanish Civil War.

Although Orwell is acknowledged mainly for his novels by the present-day reader, his essays and journalistic work is evidence of his deep interest and understanding of the politics of his era. Strongly opinionated and impartial to his subject, Orwell wrote his mind in a way that still seems contemporary. The writing of George Orwell does not seek to entertain the reader on purpose; instead he captures the attention of his audience by the friendly and welcoming fashion of his words. Orwell stressed on simplicity, creativity and innovation in writing. His uniqueness is his lucid style. Going in and out of hospitals for 3 years, Tuberculosis became the reason of Orwell’s demise on January 21, 1950.

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George Orwell

George Orwell, aka Eric Arthur Blair, was an English essayist, novelist, critic, and journalist. The works of George Orwell are featured by bitter social criticism, coherent prose, and hostility to totalitarianism, and blunt support of democratic communism.

George Orwell wrote fiction, poetry, literary criticism, and polemical journalism.  He is well-known for his most celebrated allegorical novel Animal Farm published in 1945 and a dystopian novel 1984 that was published in 1949.

He also produced non-fiction works that include The Road to Wigan Pier published in 1937 and Homage to Catalonia published in 1938.  The Road to Wigan Pier is his personal account of his working-class experience in the north of England; whereas, Homage to Catalonia is based on his first-hand experience of soldering in the Spanish Civil War. These two essays are critically admired for their views on politics and literature, culture, and language. Among the 50 greatest British writers since 1945, George Orwell was ranked 2 nd by The Time in 2008.

The works of George Orwell are influential in the politics and literature of England. To describe the authoritarian and social practices, the adjective “Orwellian” is used in the English language. His other coinages are Thought Police, Big Brother, Room101, Memory hole, Two Minutes Hate, doublethink, Newspeak, Unperson, thoughtcrime, and proles.

A Short Biography of George Orwell

George Orwell was born on 25 th June 1903 in Bengal in the class of Sahibs. His father serves the British official in the Indian civil services, whereas his mother belonged to French and was a daughter of a teak merchant in Myanmar Burma. Though they belong to the lower-middle class, they have the attitude of “landless legendary.” Orwell grew up in an atmosphere of underprivileged condescension. He returned to England with his parents, and in 1911, he was sent to elementary boarding school on the coast of Sussex. Over there, his poverty and intellectual brilliance mark him distinguished from other boys. He was made to grow up as a miserable, reserved, and bizarre boy in the boarding school. In his essay Such, Such Were the Joys published in 1953, he recounts the miseries of these days.  

Orwell secured the scholarships of Eton and Wellington, the two of the leading schools in England. He attended the Wellington School for a short time, and from 1917 to 1921, he attended Eton.  He published his first writing in the Eton College in the college periodicals. After completing college, he did not continue his higher education, and following the tradition of his family, he went to Burma in 1922. He was given a position in the Indian Imperial Police as assistant district superintendent.  He worked at different stations of the country and gave an impression of an imperial servant.

From boyhood, he wanted to become a writer. He realized that the Burmese are ruled over by the British against their will and treat them as enemies; he started feeling ashamed of his job as a colonial police officer. In his novel Burmese Days , and autobiographical essays “A Hanging” and “Shooting an Elephant,” that he wrote later on in his life, he recounted those experiences and his personal views on imperialism.

In 1927, Orwell went to England on leave, and in England, he decided not to continue his job in Burma. On 1 st January 1928, he resigned from the imperial police. As he had taken a decision before, he had already begun a course of action to become a writer. He felt guilty for the status that prevented him from mingling with the Burmese; he went to East England and started living in slums with the poor people

It was his experiences in the slums that he recounted in his work Down and Out in Paris and London. In this work, he rearranged the real incidents into fiction. The book was then published in 1933 that gained him little recognition.  In 1934, he published his first novel Burmese Days . The novel establishes his design of the succeeding novels in which he portrayed a conscientious, sensitive, and lonely emotional individual who is against the dishonest and oppressive society.  In 1935 he wrote A Clergyman’s Daughter, and in 1936, he wrote Keep the Aspidistra Flying.

George Orwell personally rejected his bourgeois lifestyle and political reorientation in his revolt against imperialism. He called himself revolutionary soon after his return from Burma. During the 1930s, he called him socialist; however, he was not too liberal in his thinking to declare himself a communist.

In 1937 Orwell published his first socialist book The Road to Wigan pier . This was his original and nonconformist political discourse. The book is a serious criticism of the prevailing social movements. The time when the book was in printing, Orwell went to Spain to report the Civil War and joined the Republican Militia. He served on the Teruel and Aragon fronts and rose to the second lieutenant. In May 1937, he started fighting against the communist in Barcelona and escaped to Spain to save his life when the communist started killing their political opponents. In 1938, he published Homage to Catalonia, in which he recounted his Spanish experiences and lifelong dread of communism.

In 1938, he returned to England. In the following year, he wrote Coming Up for Air in which he showed unexpected conservative anxiety. Orwell refused to pay any military services in World War II and started a job as a head in Indian head office of British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). In 1943, he left his job at BBC and started a job at Tribune as literary editor. During that time, Orwell had become a creative journalist and wrote many reviews and articles for newspapers along with serious criticism. He advocated decentralist socialism and liberation. In 1945 he published the most celebrated allegorical novella “Animal Farm.” It is a harsh criticism of Russian Stalinism. Following “Animal farm,” he published 1984 in 1947. He died on 21 st January 1950 due to Tuberculosis.

George Orwell’s Writing Style

Typically, the writing style of George Orwell is brief and to the point . In his late works Animal Farm and 1984, Orwell does not use any figurative language, intricate language, and unnecessary words intentionally. His writings are largely based on social and political issues and contain an obscure political message.

According to George Orwell, the language used by many writers of his time was incorrect and was used to trick people. He asserts that modern writers were writing without using the actual term, thus making it easier for the readers to deploy the reality and quite difficult to understand the real meaning from the text.

Through the use of exaggerated language and euphemism, the political writers try to sound well-informed and keen.  For example, the fascist regimes of World War II used the word “elimination” to justify their mass killing and exploitation. For Orwell, the English language was insensitive and chaotic. It allowed people to have unethical thoughts and are not able to think freely.

According to Orwell, Literature will become more beautiful when it becomes simple and clear for normal readers. Orwell improved his writing in St. Cyprian School and inspired his writing from the most experienced. His writings reflect the teaching of Mrs. Cicely Vaughan Wilkes. She taught him honesty, simplicity, and avoidance of verbosity.

Orwell offers six rules of writing literature in his book “Politics and the English Language,” which will help the writers to improve their writings as well as avoid the exploitation of modern English.  The writing style of George Orwell is also based on these six rules. He did not use the ordinary figures of speeches like simile, metaphor, etc. and the one used by other writers.

According to Orwell, a writer cannot understand the true meaning of the phrase when he imitates others, and the original purpose is lost.

Secondly, he did not use long words where short words can easily be fit. For Orwell, simplicity in literature is valuable. It is better to convey the message in simple language than figurative language.

Thirdly, he wrote short, straight and to the point sentences .

Fourthly, he would write in an active voice and do not use passive voice without necessity. For him, the passive voice creates unnecessary confusion.

Fifth, He did not use any scientific word or foreign phrase if there is an equivalent word in the everyday language. He was very flexible in his writing and also advised the readers and writer not to strictly abide by these rules. If there is a necessity of breaking the rule for better, then break it. In the book, he writes that for certain, you will find that I have again and again committed the very faults I am protesting against”.

In his two most celebrated and well-read novels, Animal Farm and 1984, Orwell reflects his personal beliefs about the English Language. He used language to manipulate and control others in both novels.  The elite pigs in Animal Farm use the intricate figure of speeches, propaganda, and songs to twist their meanings of words and make a fool of other animals.

In 1984 , the language was made limited, which does not allow people to express their thoughts in words. Thus, Orwell implies that the government can manipulate the thoughts of people. The government uses the ideological state apparatus to spread the discourses in Newspeak.

Moreover, George Orwell has a journalistic and direct style. To illustrate his meaning behind his whole writing, he used extended metaphors and allusions; however, he does not employ them in his writing. He has a dry style and does not use unnecessary imagery. This does not imply that he did not explain the scenery in the setting; it is just that he did not use figurative language.

The major themes of his works are language, loyalty, totalitarianism, poor vs. rich, imperialism, propaganda, love/ sexuality, communism, and technology, etc.

Works Of George Orwell

• Animal Farm
• Shooting an Elephant

Index Index

• Other Authors :    

What Orwell Really Feared

In 1946, the author repaired to the remote Isle of Jura and wrote his masterpiece, 1984 . What was he looking for?

The Isle of Jura is a patchwork of bogs and moorland laid across a quartzite slab in Scotland’s Inner Hebrides. Nearly 400 miles from London, rain-lashed, more deer than people: All the reasons not to move there were the reasons George Orwell moved there. Directions to houseguests ran several paragraphs and could include a plane, trains, taxis, a ferry, another ferry, then miles and miles on foot down a decrepit, often impassable rural lane. It’s safe to say the man wanted to get away. From what?

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Orwell himself could be sentimental about his longing to escape (“Thinking always of my island in the Hebrides,” he’d once written in his wartime diary) or wonderfully blunt. In the aftermath of Hiroshima, he wrote to a friend:

This stupid war is coming off in abt 10–20 years, & this country will be blown off the map whatever else happens. The only hope is to have a home with a few animals in some place not worth a bomb.

It helps also to remember Orwell’s immediate state of mind when he finally fully moved to Jura, in May 1946. Four months before Hiroshima, his wife, Eileen, had died; shortly after the atomic bomb was dropped, Animal Farm was published.

From the March 1947 issue: George Orwell’s ‘The Prevention of Literature’

Almost at once, in other words, Orwell became a widower, terrified by the coming postwar reality, and famous—the latter a condition he seems to have regarded as nothing but a bother. His newfound sense of dread was only adding to one he’d felt since 1943, when news of the Tehran Conference broke. The meeting had been ominous to Orwell: It placed in his head the idea of Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin divvying up the postwar world, leading to a global triopoly of super-states. The man can be forgiven for pouring every ounce of his grief, self-pity, paranoia (literary lore had it that he thought Stalin might have an ice pick with his name on it), and embittered egoism into the predicament of his latest protagonist, Winston Smith.

Unsurprisingly, given that it culminated in both his masterpiece and his death, Orwell’s time on the island has been picked over by biographers, but Orwell’s Island: George, Jura and 1984 , by Les Wilson, treats it as a subject worthy of stand-alone attention. The book is at odds with our sense of Orwell as an intrepid journalist. It is a portrait of a man jealously guarding his sense of himself as a creature elementally apart, even as he depicts the horrors of a world in which the human capacity for apartness is being hunted down and destroyed.

Wilson is a former political journalist, not a critic, who lives on neighboring Islay, famous for its whiskeys. He is at pains to show how Orwell, on Jura, overcame one of his laziest prejudices: The author went from taking every opportunity to laugh at the Scots for their “burns, braes, kilts, sporrans, claymores, bagpipes” (who is better at the derisive list than Orwell?) to complaining about the relative lack of Gaelic-language radio programming.

Scottish had come to mean something more to him than kailyard kitsch. These were a people holding out against a fully amalgamated identity, beginning with the Kingdom of Great Britain and extending to modernity itself. On Jura at least, crofters and fishermen still lived at a village scale. As to whether Jura represented, as has been suggested, suicide by other means—Orwell was chronically ill, and Barnhill, his cottage, was 25 miles from the island’s one doctor—Wilson brushes this aside. In fact, he argues that Jura was “kinder to Orwell’s ravaged lungs than smog-smothered London,” where inhabitants were burning scavenged wood to stay warm.

At Barnhill, Orwell set up almost a society in miniature, devoting his 16-acre homestead to his ideal of self-sufficiency. Soon after moving there, he was joined by his sister, his 2-year-old adopted son, and a nanny. Amid the general, often biting, austerity of postwar Europe, they enjoyed a private cornucopia, subsisting on, as Wilson says, a diet of “fish, lobster, rabbit, venison and fresh milk and eggs,” and were often warmed by peat that Orwell himself had cut. He intended to live there for the rest of his life, raising his son and relishing an existence as a non-cog in a noncapitalist machine.

From the July 2019 issue: Doublethink is stronger than Orwell imagined

He lived without electricity or phone; shot rabbits “for the pot,” as Wilson says; raised geese to be slaughtered and plucked; and fished the surrounding waters in a dinghy. He fashioned a tobacco pouch from animal skin and a mustard spoon out of deer bone, and served his aghast guests a seaweed blancmange. Over time, absconding to Jura and writing 1984 became aspects of a single premonition: a coming world of perpetual engulfment by the forces of bigness. As Orwell’s latest biographer, D. J. Taylor, has pointed out in Orwell: The New Life , Orwell’s novels before Animal Farm followed a common template of a sensitive young person going up against a heartless society, destined to lose. Eileen is the one who helped him—either by suggesting that Animal Farm be told as a fable or by lightening his touch, depending on whom you talk to—find a newly engaging, even playful (in its way), register.

The loss of Eileen and return of the self-pitying Orwell alter ego are certainly linked. And indeed, in 1984 he produces his most Orwellian novel, in both senses—only now both protagonist and situation are presented in the absolute extreme   : The young man is the bearer (if we believe his tormentor, O’Brien) of the last shred of human autonomy, in a society both totally corrupt and laying total claim to his being.

What this absolutism produced, of course, was not another fusty neo-Edwardian novel à la Orwell’s earlier Keep the Aspidistra Flying , but a wild, aggrieved tour de force of dystopian erotica. Odd though it may sound, given the novel’s unremitting torments, 1984 quickly became a best seller, in no small part because its first readers, especially in America, found it comforting—a source of the release you might feel, in a darkened theater, when you remember that you yourself are not being chased by a man with a chain saw. The reader could glance up, notice no limitless police powers or kangaroo inquisitions, and say: We are not them .

Such complacency is hard to come by in 2024. Thinking of Orwell, famous though he is for his windowpane prose and the prescience of his essays, as the ultimate sane human being is not so easy either. Rereading 1984 in light of the Jura episode suggests that Orwell was an altogether weirder person, and his last novel an altogether weirder book, than we’ve appreciated.

Conventionally speaking, 1984 is not a good novel; it couldn’t be. Novels are about the conflict between an individual’s inner-generated aims and a prevailing social reality that denies or thwarts them. 1984 is the depiction of the collapse of this paradigm—the collapse of inner and outer in all possible iterations. Of course its protagonist is thinly drawn: Winston’s self lacks a social landscape to give it dimensionality.

In place of anything like a novel proper, we get a would-be bildungsroman breaking through to the surface in disparate fragments. These scraps are Winston’s yearnings, memories, sensual instincts, which have, as yet, somehow gone unmurdered by the regime. The entire state-sponsored enterprise of Pavlovian sadism in Oceania is devoted to snuffing out this remnant interiority.

The facsimile of a life that Winston does enact comes courtesy of a series of private spaces—a derelict church, a clearing in the woods, a room above a junk shop—the last of which is revealed to have been a regime-staged contrivance. The inexorable momentum of the novel is toward the final such private space, Winston’s last line of defense, and the last line of defense in any totalitarian society: the hidden compartment of his mind.

When all else fails, there is the inaccessibility of human mentality to others, a black box in every respect. Uncoincidentally, Winston’s final defense—hiding out in his head—had been Orwell’s first. While he struggled on Jura to finish 1984 , Orwell apparently returned to “Such, Such Were the Joys,” his long and excoriating essay about his miserable years at St. Cyprian’s boarding school. He’d been sent there at the age of 8, one of the shabby-genteel boys with brains in what was otherwise a class snob’s paradise. He was a bed wetter to boot, for which, Orwell writes, he was brutally punished. No wonder he found dignity in apartness. Taylor’s biography is brilliant about the connection between Orwell’s childhood reminiscence and 1984 .

In the essay, Orwell portrays his alma mater as an environment that invaded every cranny of its pupils’ lives. Against this, he formed his sense of bearing “at the middle of one’s heart,” as he writes, “an incorruptible inner self” holding out against an autocratic headmistress. As a cop in Burma, a scullion in Paris, an amateur ethnographer in northern England, he was a man who kept his own company, even when in company, and whom others, as a consequence, found by and large inscrutable.

What was this man’s genius, if not taking the petty anxieties of Eric Blair, his given name, and converting them into the moral clarity of George Orwell? Fearful that his own cherished apartness was being co-opted into nonexistence, he projected his fear for himself onto something he called the “autonomous individual,” who, as he said in his 1940 essay “Inside the Whale,” “is going to be stamped out of existence.” To this he added:

The literature of liberalism is coming to an end and the literature of totalitarianism has not yet appeared and is barely imaginable. As for the writer, he is sitting on a melting iceberg; he is merely an anachronism, a hangover from the bourgeois age, as surely doomed as the hippopotamus.

The fate of the autonomous individual, “the writer,” the literature of liberalism—he carried all of it to Jura, where he dumped it onto the head of poor Winston Smith.

Orwell typed for hours upstairs, sitting on his iron bedstead in a tatty dressing gown, chain-smoking shag tobacco. In May 1947, he felt he had a third of a draft, and in November, a completed one. In December, he was in a hospital outside Glasgow, diagnosed with “chronic” tuberculosis—not a death sentence, maybe, but his landlord on Jura suspected that Orwell now knew he was dying.

The following July, after grueling treatments and a stint in a sanatorium, he returned to Jura fitter but by no means cured, and under strict orders to take it easy. His rough draft, however, was a riot of scrawled-over pages. To produce a clean manuscript for the publisher, he would need to hire and closely supervise a typist, but no candidate was willing to trek to Jura, and Orwell was unwilling to leave it. He typed 1984 on his own, having all but spent himself writing it.

“He should have been in bed,” Wilson says, and instead sat “propped up on a sofa” banging out 5,000 words a day. Among all of its gruesome set pieces, culminating in Room 101 in the Ministry of Love, the novel’s most decisive act of torment is a simple glance in the mirror. Winston is sure—it is one of his last consolations, before breaking completely—that some inherent principle exists in the universe to prevent a system based on nothing but cruelty and self-perpetuation from triumphing forever. O’Brien calmly assures Winston that he’s wrong, that he is “the last man,” and to prove it, and the obvious nonexistence of “the human spirit,” he forces Winston to look at himself:

A bowed, greycoloured, skeleton-like thing was coming towards him. Its actual appearance was frightening, and not merely the fact that he knew it to be himself. He moved closer to the glass. The creature’s face seemed to be protruded, because of its bent carriage. A forlorn, jailbird’s face with a nobby forehead running back into a bald scalp, a crooked nose, and battered-looking cheekbones above which his eyes were fierce and watchful. The cheeks were seamed, the mouth had a drawn-in look. Certainly it was his own face, but it seemed to him that it had changed more than he had changed inside. The emotions it registered would be different from the ones he felt.

The final membrane between inner and outer is dissolving. 1984 can read like Orwell’s reverse autobiography, in which, rather than a life being built up, it gets disassembled down to its foundational unit. The body is now wasting; the voice is losing expressive competence. Worse, the face will soon enough have nothing left to express, as the last of his adaptive neurocircuitry becomes property of Oceania.

1984 is Orwell saying goodbye to himself, and an improbably convincing portrait of the erasure of the autonomous individual. He finished typing the novel by early December 1948. His final diary entry on Jura—dated that Christmas Eve—gave the weight of the Christmas goose “before drawing & plucking,” then concluded: “Snowdrops up all over the place. A few tulips showing. Some wall-flowers still trying to flower.” The next month, he was back in a sanatorium; the next year, he was dead. He was 46 years old.

1 984 was published 75 years ago. Surprisingly, it immediately surpassed Animal Farm as a critical and commercial success. One by one, Orwell’s contemporaries—V. S. Pritchett, Rebecca West, Bertrand Russell—acknowledged its triumph. A rare dissenter was Evelyn Waugh, who wrote to Orwell to say that he’d found the book morally inert. “You deny the soul’s existence (at least Winston does) and can only contrast matter with reason & will.” The trials of its protagonist consequently failed to make Waugh’s “flesh creep.” What, he implied, was at stake here?

Talk about missing the point. Nowhere in Orwell’s work can one find evidence of anything essential, much less eternal, that makes us human. That’s why Winston, our meager proxy, is available for a thoroughgoing reboot. As the book implies, we’re creatures of contingency all the way down. Even a memory of a memory of freedom, autonomy, self-making, consciousness, and agency—in a word, of ourselves—can disappear, until no loss is felt whatsoever. Hence the terror of being “the last man”: You’re the living terminus, the lone bearer of what will be, soon enough, a dead language.

A precious language, indicating a way of being in the world worth keeping—if you’re George Orwell. From the evidence of Jura and 1984 , persisting as his own catawampus self—askew to the world—was a habit he needed to prove he couldn’t possibly kick. He could be the far-off yet rooted man who loved being a father; performing what he deemed “sane” tasks, such as building a henhouse; indulging his grim compulsions (smoking tobacco and writing books). The soul, eternal fabric of God, had no place in that equation.

Waugh wasn’t the only muddled reader of the book. In the aftermath of the Berlin blockade and the creation of NATO , followed by the Soviets’ detonation of their first atomic weapon , readers—Americans, especially—might have been eager for an anti-Stalinist bedtime story. But Orwell had already written an anti-Stalinist bedtime story. If his time on Jura tells us anything, it’s that in 1984 , he was exhorting us to beware of concentrated power and pay attention to public language, yes, but above all, guard your solitude against interlopers, Stalinist or otherwise.

In addition to the book’s top-down anxieties about the coming managerial overclass, a bottom-up anxiety about how fragile solitude is—irreducible to an abstract right or a material good—permeates 1984 . Paradoxically, Winston’s efforts to hold fast to the bliss of separateness are what give the book its unexpected turns of beauty and humanity. (“The sweet summer air played against his cheek. From somewhere far away there floated the faint shouts of children: in the room itself there was no sound except the insect voice of the clock.”) For all of Orwell’s intrepidness, his physical courage, his clarity of expression, his most resolutely anti-fascist instinct lay here: in his terror at the thought of never being alone.

This article appears in the May 2024 print edition with the headline “Orwell’s Escape.”

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Fewer Pesky Words, More Movie Stars Steer a New ‘1984’

A hectic high-profile adaptation for Audible plays fast and loose with George Orwell’s original text.

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By Shreya Chattopadhyay

Shreya Chattopadhyay is on the editorial staff of the Book Review.

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1984, by George Orwell, read by Andrew Garfield, Cynthia Erivo, Andrew Scott, Tom Hardy, Chukwudi Iwuji and others.

“Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood,” Winston Smith, the pain-addled protagonist of George Orwell’s dystopian 1949 classic “1984,” ponders while learning to love Big Brother at the end of a needle — his rogue thought offering a kernel of humanity amid the novel’s grim landscape.

You won’t find that line in “George Orwell’s 1984,” Audible’s star-studded “original adaptation” helmed by playwright Joe White, though this new version’s approach to Orwell attests to the endurance of people’s desire for connection and communion, even in the worst circumstances.

At nearly three and a half hours, it also runs about a third of the length of other “1984” audiobook versions. This is because, save some key passages, it radically alters the text. Gone are Orwell’s sardonic third-person descriptions. Here instead is Andrew Garfield’s breathy Winston, muttering to himself and “you” (us, the listeners of “the future”) with all the trappings of 21st-century speech and sensibility. What is happening in Oceania is “surveillance,” he explains redundantly. If his thoughtcrimes are discovered, he’ll be consigned to a “terrible job in the suburbs” — or worse, in which case he’s not sure what to do. “I’m a coward,” he remarks, with palpable self-loathing.

Instead of Orwell’s words, this version relies heavily on audio effects, from gadgety voices of telescreens whirring “Microphones enhance” to a cinematic score performed by the London Metropolitan Orchestra (featuring pop disco and video game synths galore) to the extravagant heavy breathing of Winston and Julia (Cynthia Erivo) as they declare the liberatory power of their love. The resulting experience feels less like a book than a high-budget play behind a curtain, or a movie watched with your eyes closed. (Tom Hardy also appears briefly as a steely but avuncular Big Brother, and Andrew Scott is harrowing as Winston’s torturer and foil O’Brien.)

In one sense, this approach emphasizes the paranoid qualities of the story, engulfing the listener and closing in. But stripping “1984” of so much of its language mostly serves to undermine the novel’s central themes about language — its role as a tool of state repression, its ability to structure not only communication but thought.

When Winston and Julia betrayed each other, I didn’t quite believe them; for psychologically tortured dissidents turned foot soldiers, they sounded just a little too relatable. Maybe Audible has made 2024 America’s “1984,” with our freshly reconsidered antiheroes and love amid climate collapse . But not George Orwell’s.

1984 | By George Orwell | Read by Andrew Garfield, Cynthia Erivo, Andrew Scott, Tom Hardy, Chukwudi Iwuji and others | Audible Originals | 3 hours, 27 minutes

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Sadistic and misogynistic? Row erupts over sex claims in book about George Orwell’s marriage

Author of acclaimed biography Wifedom hits back at critics who say book casts Orwell in an unfairly negative light

George Orwell was in his mid-40s, enjoying the peak of his fame after the publication of Animal Farm . Yet his mood was low after the death of his wife, Eileen. He was in Wales with his friend Arthur Koestler, where they were joined by 27-year-old Celia Kirwan. She and Orwell spent the night together, with Kirwan commenting afterwards that the author made love “Burma-sergeant fashion”, clearly in a hurry and simply saying: “Ah, that’s better” before turning over.

This story is included in a recent book, Wifedom , about the marriage of Orwell and his first wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy. However, the author is now at the centre of a row about the veracity of some of the claims that she makes, including this one.

This story of Orwell and Kirwan’s sexual encounter is one of the passages that Viking, part of Penguin Random House, has agreed to correct, as well as another that tells of a trip where the pair met on the Scottish island of Jura. One more is the location of Orwell’s country of birth, which is cited as Burma, not India.

Wifedom is written by Anna Funder , winner of the top nonfiction prize, the Samuel Johnson, now known as the Baillie Gifford, for Stasiland . When Wifedom was published late this summer, it garnered widespread praise, including a review in the Observer in which writer Stephanie Merritt described it as a “ vital, if incomplete, portrait of a woman whose unseen work was instrumental in the creation of books that became cornerstones of 20th-century literature”.

The Times in its review acknowledges that while “not everyone will feel easy about the passages in which Funder allows herself to imagine what is going on inside Eileen’s head”, most readers will be “simply thrilled – and shaken – by this passionately partisan act of literary reparation”.

However, the claims in the book have left some readers unhappy. Among them are two children of two of Orwell’s closest friends, who have written to the publishers in anger about errors and tone. “Funder paints Eileen as a bullied woman suffering at the hands of a misogynist,” says Quentin Kopp, whose father Georges was Orwell’s commander during the Spanish civil war.

Kirwan’s daughter, Ariane Bankes, an author herself, says: “I know from letters between my mother and her twin sister, Mamaine, who was married to Koestler, that despite Orwell’s advances, she never wanted sex with Orwell, and never had any.”

Bankes also told Viking that Funder erroneously wrote that her mother went to Jura in the late 1940s to stay with Orwell. Funder told the Observer : “We’ve agreed to remove the references to Celia being a lover of Orwell and visiting him on Jura.” However Funder does write in her book of “almost innumerable infidelities” during his marriage.

University educated, O’Shaughnessy had various jobs before meeting Orwell in 1935 and marrying him the next year. She followed him to Spain, working for the Independent Labour party (ILP) and helping her husband on Homage to Catalonia . During the second world war, she was employed by the Ministry of Information.

In 2020 Sylvia Topp published a much-praised biography about O’Shaughnessy, in part inspired by recently found letters between Eileen and her best friend Norah Myles. Yet Funder’s book, published two months ago, is subtitled “Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life”. Bill Hamilton, who is Topp’s literary agent and the executor of Orwell’s estate, is unhappy about this. “Sylvia’s book is not adequately credited by Anna Funder,” he says.

Funder rejects this. “I do express my debt to Topp’s work,” she says. However most references to Topp are in notes at the back of her book.

Jean Seaton, director of the Orwell prize, is also annoyed. “Funder argues that Orwell’s previous biographers did not give Eileen a voice. They mentioned her, but not until the letters between Eileen and Norah emerged was a fuller picture possible.”

On several occasions in Wifedom , Funder makes remarks about Orwell’s “six previous male biographers” not writing more about Eileen. “It would have been possible for them,” says Funder. “Like her work at the ILP headquarters in Barcelona, saving her husband’s life during the war in Spain, and later helping him with Animal Farm .” Funder is also aggrieved that Orwell referred to “my wife” 37 times in Homage to Catalonia rather than using her name.

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However Kopp, chair of the Orwell Society, contends that Orwell did not mention Eileen’s name “partly to protect her in a dangerous situation”.

Eileen died aged only 39 in March 1945 – a year after the couple had adopted a young child, Richard. It was after this that Orwell renewed his pursuit of sexual partners, claims Funder, writing that he “pounces on and proposes to at least four women”, including Kirwan. Just three months before he died in January 1950, Orwell married Sonia Brownell, on whom Julia, the heroine of Nineteen Eighty-Four , is believed to be based.

A strong theme of Wifedom is the patriarchy. “Men who believe they can behave badly while delegating to the women who support them,” Funder says. Bankes, however, counters: “Eileen did what she did for Orwell out of choice. She was not starry-eyed about him.”

Kopp argues that Funder has “imposed a modern feminist view on a marriage of 80 years ago. She has also decided to attack Orwell, for whatever reasons, in a book which is destructive of him and his reputation.”

Funder accepts some errors and that there are “differences of opinion and interpretation”. But she stands her ground on the central thesis of the book. “Orwell was sadistic and misogynistic, but such a powerful writer in part because of his failings.”

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