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Biography George Orwell

Orwell’s Early life

Orwell was born Eric Blair on 25 June 1903, in Motihari, Bihar, in India. Shortly after his birth, he was taken by his mother back to Oxfordshire, England. His family were financially poor, but an aspiring middle-class family. Orwell described it as ‘lower-upper-middle-class’ – a reflection of the importance he felt the English attached to class labels.

With his family unable to afford fees to a proper public school, he was educated at St Cyprian’s in Eastbourne, which served as a preliminary crammer to gaining a scholarship for public schools like Eton. In a later essay “Such, Such were the Joys” he was scathing of his time at St Cyprian’s noting how difficult it was to be happy in such a mean-spirited environment. Aged 14, he was able to move to Eton, where he had better memories because of the greater intellectual stimulation. However, the awareness of being much poorer than many of his school friends remained. He left Eton with firmly held “middle class” values but at the same time a sense of unease with his social position.

After school, he was unable to afford university, and for want of a better option, Orwell took a job with the Burmese civil service. It was here in Burma, that Orwell would begin to assert his independence from his privileged upbringing. Revealingly, Orwell later told how he found himself rooting for the local population, and despising the imperial ideology which he represented. He resigned from his position in 1927. In an essay Shooting the Elephant he describes he feelings on Burma:

“ Theoretically and secretly of course, I was always for the Burmese and all against the oppressors, the British. As for the job I was doing I hated it more bitterly than I can perhaps make clear” (1)

It was in the nature of George Orwell to try and see a situation from other people’s point of view. He was unhappy at accepting the conventional social wisdom. In fact, he grew to despise his middle-class upbringing so much he decided to spend time as a tramp. He wanted to experience life from the view of the gutter. His vivid experiences are recorded in his book “ Down and out in Paris and London ”. No longer could Orwell be described as a “Champagne Socialist”; by living with the poorest and underprivileged,  he gained a unique insight into the practical workings of working class ideas and working-class politics.

The Road to Wigan Pier

In the middle of the great depression, Orwell undertook another experience travelling to Wigan; an industrial town in Lancashire experiencing the full effects of mass unemployment and poverty. Orwell freely admitted how, as a young child, he was brought up to despise the working class. He vividly tells how he was obsessed with the idea that the working classes smelt:

“At a distance.. I could agonise over their sufferings, but I still hated them and despised them when I came anywhere near them .” (2)

The Road to Wigan Pier offered a penetrating insight into the condition of the working classes. It was also a right of passage for Orwell to live amongst the people he had once, from a distance, despised. The Road to Wigan Pier inevitably had a political message, but characteristically of Orwell, it was not all pleasing to the left. For example, it was less than flattering towards the Communist party. This was despite the book being promoted by a mostly Communist organisation – The Left Book club.

Orwell and the Spanish Civil War

It was fighting in the Spanish Civil war that Orwell came to really despise Communist influences. In 1936, Orwell volunteered to fight for the fledgeling Spanish Republic, who at the time were fighting the Fascist forces of General  Franco. It was a conflict that polarised nations. To the left, the war was a symbol of a real socialist revolution, based on the principles of equality and freedom. It was for these ideals that many international volunteers, from around the world, went to Spain to fight on behalf of the Republic. Orwell found himself in the heart of the Socialist revolution in Barcelona. He was assigned to an Anarchist – Trotskyist party – P.O.U.M. More than most other left-wing parties, they believed in the ideal of a real Marxist revolution. To members of the P.O.U.M, the war was not just about fighting the Fascist menace but also delivering a Socialist revolution for the working classes. In his book, “ Homage to Catalonia ” Orwell writes of his experiences; he notes the inefficiency with which the Spanish fought even wars. He was enthused by the revolutionary fervour of some of his party members; however, one of the overriding impressions was his perceived betrayal of the Republic, by the Stalinist backed Communist party.

“ the Communists stood not upon the extreme Left, but upon the extreme right. In reality this should come as no surprise, because the tactics of the Communist parties elsewhere ” (3)

Unwittingly he found himself engaged in a civil war amongst the left, as the Soviet Union backed Communist party turned on the Trotskyite factions like P.O.U.M. In the end, Orwell narrowly escaped with his life, after being shot in the throat. He was able to return to England, but he had learnt at first hand how revolutions could easily be betrayed; ideas that would later shape his seminal work “ Animal Farm .”

Orwell at the BBC

During the Second World War, Orwell was declared unfit for active duty. He actively supported the war effort from the start. (He didn’t wait for the Soviet Union to enter like some communists.) He also began writing for the left-leaning magazine ‘The Tribune’ which was associated with the left of the Labour Party. Orwell was appointed editor and was enthusiastic in supporting the radical Labour government of 1945, which implemented a national health service, welfare state and nationalisation of major industries. However, Orwell was not just focused on politics, he took an active interest in working class life and English culture. His short essays investigated aspects of English life from fish and chips to the eleven rules of making a good cup of tea.

Orwell described himself as a secular humanist and could be critical of organised religion in his writings. However, he had a fondness for the social and cultural aspect of the Church of England and attended services intermittently.

Barnhill. Jura

He married Eileen O’Shaughnessy in 1936 and in 1944, they adopted a three-week old child – Richard Horatio. Orwell was devastated when Eileen died and sought to remarry – seeking a mother for his young son. He asked several women for their hand in marriage, with Sonia Branwell accepting in 1949 – despite Orwell’s increasingly poor health. Orwell was a heavy smoker and this affected his lungs causing bronchial problems. In the last years of his life, he moved to a remote farm on the Scottish island of Jura to concentrate on his writings. Orwell passed away on 21 January 1950. His friend David Astor helped him to be buried at Sutton Courtenay churchyard, Oxfordshire.

The two great novels of Orwell were “ Animal Farm ” and “ 1984 ”. Animal Farm is a simple allegory for revolutions which go wrong, based primarily on the Russian revolution. 1984 is a dystopian nightmare about the dangers of a totalitarian state which gains complete control over its citizens.

Citation: Pettinger, Tejvan . “Biography of George Orwell”, Oxford, www.biographyonline.net 3 Feb. 2013. Last updated 4 Feb 2018.

• The Socialism of George Orwell
• George Orwell Quotes
• George Orwell, “Shooting an elephant”, George Orwell selected writings (1958) p.25
• George Orwell, “Road to Wigan Pier” (Harmondswith) 1980 p.130
• George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia 1959 p.58

George Orwell – a collection of essays

George Orwell – a collection of essays at Amazon.com

Animal Farm and 1984

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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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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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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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Orwell: The New Life Hardcover – May 23, 2023

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• Print length 608 pages
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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Pegasus Books (May 23, 2023)
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One Biography Questions Orwell’s Image, and Another Brings His First Wife Into Focus

Sarah Bakewell examines two new books about Mr. and Mrs. Orwell.

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By Sarah Bakewell

ORWELL: The New Life, by D.J. Taylor

WIFEDOM: Mrs. Orwell’s Invisible Life, by Anna Funder

It was a rainy day in January 2017, the clocks were striking (almost) 13, Donald Trump was being sworn in as president of the United States, and George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four” was about to go flying to the No. 1 spot on Amazon’s sales list. Something made people curious to read about the weaponization of hate, the theatrics of power, the mutability of truth, the corruption of language, “Ignorance is strength” and “doublethink” — the ability to believe contradictory ideas while blanking out awareness of the contradiction.

It was not the first time the book had struck a chord. Released into a Cold War world in 1949, it sold out almost immediately. When the author died in January the following year, he lived on as an adjective, “Orwellian” (meaning everything he warned against), and as a figure of transcendent moral authority. But can anyone, dead or not, live up to such a role? Of course not, and Orwell’s biographers have struggled to find a balance between his thoroughly impressive life’s work and his — to put it gently — oddities and weaknesses.

The worst of the latter concern his dealings with women. He was compulsively unfaithful, and would pounce on female acquaintances who sometimes had to fight him off physically, especially if they found themselves in a forest or heath with him. (Nature, for Orwell, held an erotic charge.) Yet he did not seem to like women much as human beings. He wrote incel-ish, misogynistic rants for male protagonists of his fiction. And even he admitted that he behaved badly to his first wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy. All of this creates a problem for writers and readers, myself included, who admire Orwell and seek guidance from him in how to think about tyranny and oppression.

This year sees two interesting responses to the problem. One is by D.J. Taylor, the author of “Orwell: The Life” (2003), who supersedes that biography with a new one, sensibly called “Orwell: The New Life.” The other response is more radical: Anna Funder’s “Wifedom: Mrs. Orwell’s Invisible Life .” Funder, the author of “Stasiland,” focuses on O’Shaughnessy, and combines her story with a general analysis of female invisibility.

Let’s start with Taylor. He traces the usual biographical arc, from Orwell’s birth in Bengal in 1903 to his death from tuberculosis in 1950, via boarding-school sufferings, a spell in the Burma colonial police, hobo-ing in Paris and London, fighting in the Spanish Civil War, and his two very different marriages: the first, long one with Eileen, and the second, to Sonia Brownell, conducted on his deathbed and thus necessarily short. Taylor adds interesting sidelights. I like his thematic mini-chapters, on such topics as Orwell and rats (he hated them), Orwell and toads (he loved them, as symbols of old-fashioned English nature, though there is no sign he wanted to have sex with them), and “Orwell and the ‘Nancy Boys,’” which explores a horror of homosexuality so extreme that Taylor, like others, wonders whether Orwell was protesting too much.

One reason Taylor gives for writing a new book is the material unearthed by researchers since the previous version. Among these finds, in 2005, was a set of six letters from Eileen to her friend Norah Symes Myles. These have been published before, but they give Taylor a valuable insight into what it would have been like to live with Orwell. They also illuminate Eileen herself; from being a shadowy figure, not least because Orwell himself had so little to say about her, she emerges as a woman who was wittily, laughingly, intelligently alive, but who fades before our eyes as time goes on.

This attrition is the central thread of Funder’s book. Hers is not the first biography of Eileen; both she and Taylor praise Sylvia Topp’s “Eileen: The Making of George Orwell” (2020). But Funder does a virtuoso performance on the theme, adding personal memoir, some fictional reconstructions and a glittering sense of purpose. “I wanted to make her live,” she writes of Eileen, “and at the same time to reveal the wicked magic trick that had erased her.” By “magic,” she means the prestidigitation that so often makes women disappear, in life and in books. Biographers of men often do it unconsciously by expressing actions in passive or impersonal constructions, so that houses are rented and furnished, and literary parties are held. Authors’ manuscripts apparently type themselves and edit themselves, or even suggest beneficial improvements to themselves. The women behind these miracles are unnamed and unseen.

Eileen’s life is rich in examples. Born in 1905, she started with zest: She studied English at Oxford, wrote journalism and poetry, and had just started a postgraduate degree in psychology when she met Orwell (or, rather, Eric Blair — his real name) at a party. She liked him; he was bowled over by her, and announced to a friend, “Eileen O’Shaughnessy is the girl I want to marry.” So he did. When they signed the marriage certificate, he put “Author” in the Profession column, but she put only a dash, to signify “none” or “not applicable.” The erasure had begun.

Their honeymoon was rocky; Eileen joked to Norah that the marriage might soon end in “murder or separation.” But they survived. When Orwell signed up to fight fascists in Spain in 1936, Eileen went too. Funder pieces together the extensive, often dangerous work she did there — managing supplies and communications for the cause, procuring visas and hiding passports so they could leave safely. Yet you would never know that from Orwell’s “Homage to Catalonia.” He mentions her 37 times, but only as “my wife,” and he makes it sound as though she did little more than sit in a Barcelona hotel room.

Similar obscurity covers the work Eileen did in the Second World War: Initially, she was the couple’s main earner, working first in the (very “Orwellian”) Censorship Department of the Ministry of Information, and then for the Ministry of Food. Orwell could not join up to fight, because of his deteriorating health. In fact, Eileen was also seriously ill. After suffering a series of hemorrhages, she was diagnosed with uterine tumors. Two doctors advised a hysterectomy; one thought she should wait for a transfusion to restore her blood levels first, while the other thought it better to operate immediately.

Eileen wrote a long, anguished letter to her husband, now away as a war correspondent in France. The letter is filled with her doubts, not so much about the operation itself as about the expense; she wishes she could have sought Orwell’s advice before spending “his” funds. She adds, “What worries me is that I really don’t think I’m worth the money.” This may be intended as a wry joke, but it is a revealing one. Taylor calls it “a terrible moment,” while Funder sees the whole 4,000-word outpouring as “the most terrifying letter.” It was not forwarded to Orwell promptly, so he knew nothing of what ensued, which was that Eileen took a bus, alone, to the hospital, to have the operation recommended by the second doctor. She died on the operating table.

Shocked, Orwell threw himself chaotically into trying to find a replacement. Over a short period, he asked four women to marry him, including Sonia Brownell. She turned him down the first time, but accepted his late-stage second try. Taylor wonders why, and is left with the quasi explanation Brownell herself once gave to a friend: “I don’t know. … I felt sorry for him.”

Both women remain a little enigmatic in Taylor’s narrative. For Funder, this is not enough; biographers are too willing to leave women as figures of mystery. Instead, she squeezes every drop from the sources, to make Eileen real. She does the same with other women in the story, notably Orwell’s vigorous “Aunt Nellie” Limouzin, a socialist and feminist who popped up throughout his life to help him with accommodation, jobs and literary contacts.

Funder stresses that she has no wish to “cancel” Orwell, a writer she finds inspiring. Her aim is rather to rescue Eileen and other women from having been canceled themselves. She sees Orwell’s biographers as colluding with him to keep the women invisible and omit their particularities. In an ironic twist, she does the same to them, usually calling them “the biographers” without distinguishing their individual merits. One visualizes a phalanx of men, advancing arm in arm.

One of these men is, of course, D.J. Taylor, for his earlier book rather than the new one. So, how does he now measure up to Funder’s challenge?

The verdict, I think, is mixed. Many women who loom large in Funder’s account are mentioned only briefly in his, but that is fair enough in a one-subject biography. More avoidable are tone-deaf moments, as when he calls Orwell’s habit of making passes at Eileen’s friends “nest-fouling”: men’s-club badinage that deposits Eileen in a stay-at-home bowl of twigs. (Can we imagine using such a phrase if the genders were reversed?) Worse, he mentions a conference at which the distinguished feminist Beatrix Campbell spoke about male bias in Orwell’s study of northern English poverty, “The Road to Wigan Pier.” For Taylor, listening to this was “like watching a small child trying to bring down an elephant with a peashooter.” That line could have done the author a favor by editing itself out.

But Taylor also unpicks Orwell’s “saintly” image, to reveal a peculiarly limited man whose worldview “glows with unreality.” Here is someone who, having trashed a fellow writer’s work in a review, seemed amazed that the writer might be reluctant to socialize with him. He dressed as a tramp and idealized the poor, yet his grasp of their actual lives was vague. As Taylor says of Wigan, “For all his assiduousness in collecting housing statistics, it is remarkable how little Orwell actually sees there.” He notes Orwell’s tendency to put people into sweeping categories: to call a person “a fairly typical petty criminal,” or a group “a pretty low lot,” and see little beyond that. No wonder he was just as limited in seeing women.

Although they approach the matter from different angles, both of these writers problematize the Orwell myth and try to work out what he can and cannot do for us. Both make use of Orwell’s own intellectual tools: his exposure of doublethink and of the magic tricks of oppression, his championing of those who suffer, and his commitment to clear thought. Funder and Taylor deploy all this to throw light on the people Orwell failed to notice or fully understand — including, perhaps, himself.

Sarah Bakewell is the author of “Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope.”

ORWELL: The New Life | By D.J. Taylor | Illustrated | 597 pp. | Pegasus Books | $39.95

WIFEDOM: Mrs. Orwell’s Invisible Life | By Anna Funder | Illustrated | 451 pp. | Alfred A. Knopf | $32

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Orwell by DJ Taylor review – a very English socialist

George Orwell’s voice comes alive again in a biography drawing on newly discovered letters

T hough he worked for the BBC for two and a half years and often spoke on air, no recording of George Orwell’s voice has been found. Many friends and memoirists have described it, and his struggles to make himself audible (all the more so after a sniper’s bullet went through his throat in Spain), but their accounts vary: was his voice high-pitched or husky, old Etonian or a Cockney drawl? DJ Taylor settles for calling it deadpan, but its elusiveness seems apt.

Orwell was one of the great voices of the 20th century. But the voice of the early novels isn’t the voice of Animal Farm or Nineteen Eighty-Four . And the voice of the reporter, down and out among Kentish hop-pickers or Grimethorpe miners, isn’t the voice of Tribune’s “As I Please” columnist. As Taylor rightly says, Orwell remains an indispensable reference point today, whether the topic is CCTV, ID cards, cancel culture or Ukraine.

But in a changing moral climate he has ceased to be Saintly George and become a murkier figure. His life was full of subterfuge and his fiction of stage management. He could be homophobic and antisemitic, too (with the slave trade in his family background), and for all his leftist meliorism his first thought on having a son (Richard, through adoption) was about putting him down for Eton. One friend portrayed him as a violent sadist. Now, 120 years after his birth, how can we make sense of Orwell’s contradictions?

This book is DJ Taylor ’s second shot at a biography: The Life came out in 2003; The New Life, eight chapters and 100 pages longer, draws on various new caches of material, mostly letters. It doesn’t offer shocking revelations. But nor is it a reprise of the first book, except for the short thematic interludes between the main chapters. The approach is fair-minded and scrupulous, with a schoolboy passion underneath. Taylor first read Orwell at the age of 13 and has kept up with everything written about him since: “he is my park, my pleasance … a writer to whom no other twentieth-century titan comes close”.

The key to his reading of Orwell is what happened to him in Spain. Though married to Eileen only six months before, he was determined to fight for the Republican cause (“Good chaps, the Spaniards, can’t let them down”) and on his return became far more politically engaged: “at last [I] really believe in Socialism, which I never did before”. But he’d seen bullying and infighting too. For the rest of his life and in his two great novels, this was the war he fought, on behalf of a wholesome, English, sweetly C of E brand of socialism, as opposed to Stalinist totalitarianism.

Equally crucial was that sniper’s bullet, which along with damp Catalan trench warfare damaged his already frail health. Born with defective bronchial tubes, he’d had bouts of pneumonia; after Spain he looked gaunt, haggard, primed for death. He hung on for 12 more years, but ill health is Taylor’s refrain throughout. If he resists making Orwell a caricatural bohemian consumptive, doomed to die young, he can’t disguise the stress and exhaustion Orwell endured in completing Nineteen Eighty-Four. Work was always his refuge in times of crisis: in the first 20 months of the second world war he produced around 200 book, theatre and film reviews, quite aside from longer essays; and in the year after Eileen’s sudden death (during an operation) he filed 130 pieces. The novel took him longer, but his insistence on typing the final version himself, while seriously ill in bed on Jura, hastened his final collapse. “It isn’t a book I would gamble on for a big sale,” he told his publisher, with his usual self-disparagement. He couldn’t have been more wrong.

If finishing the novel was his priority (work was always his priority), his second concern was to find a replacement wife. He’d been happy with the complaisant Eileen, though friends found it an odd match and it didn’t stop him pursuing other women, least of all old flames from Southwold, where his parents lived: “Eileen said she wished I could sleep with you about twice a year,” he wrote to one of them, “just to keep me happy.”

The list of those he made passes at is long – Jacintha, Brenda, Eleanor, Dorothy, Inez, Celia, among others. His wooing was mostly hapless, but after Eileen died, and he had Richard to care for, his come-ons had a new focus and intensity: to one candidate, Anne, he wrote: “What I am really asking you is whether you would like to be the widow of a literary man.” Anne declined but Sonia Brownell was more amenable. Gold-digger or Florence Nightingale? Opinions differ. She’s treated sympathetically by Taylor, though she couldn’t save her man. Orwell married her from his hospital bed and died 100 days later.

Some of the most rewarding passages here, aside from those on Southwold, are about the practical Orwell, homesteader and handyman, at his best in a ramshackle cottage, keeping hens and goats, growing potatoes, pruning raspberry bushes, selling eggs to the milkman. It’s a strand Taylor links to the novels (where love is made in the countryside) and to Orwell’s ideas of what a utopian society would be.

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The book is astute about all the other strands too – schoolboy, tramp, teacher, bookseller, broadcaster, propagandist for decency – and by the standard of most lives it’s comparatively short. No further biography will be needed for the foreseeable future, though it seems that one or even two of Orwell’s journals are lying in a Moscow archive. And who knows, maybe the BBC, which has an Orwell statue mounted outside Broadcasting House, will one day turn up a recording of his voice.

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