Life
Early years
Eric Arthur Blair was born on 25 June 1903 inPolicing in Burma
Blair's maternal grandmother lived atLondon and Paris
In England, he settled back in the family home atSouthwold
In December 1929 after nearly two years in Paris, Blair returned to England and went directly to his parents' house inTeaching career
In April 1932 Blair became a teacher at The Hawthorns High School, a school for boys, in Hayes, West London. This was a small school offering private schooling for children of local tradesmen and shopkeepers, and had only 14 or 16 boys aged between ten and sixteen, and one other master. While at the school he became friendly with the curate of the local parish church and became involved with activities there. Mabel Fierz had pursued matters with Moore, and at the end of June 1932, Moore told Blair thatHampstead
This job was as a part-time assistant in Booklovers' Corner, a second-hand bookshop in Hampstead run by Francis and Myfanwy Westrope, who were friends of Nellie Limouzin in the''The Road to Wigan Pier''
At this time, Victor Gollancz suggested Orwell spend a short time investigating social conditions in economically depressedSpanish Civil War
Orwell set out for Spain on about 23 December 1936, dining with Henry Miller in Paris on the way. Miller told Orwell that going to fight in the Civil War out of some sense of obligation or guilt was "sheer stupidity" and that the Englishman's ideas "about combating Fascism, defending democracy, etc., etc., were all baloney". A few days later in Barcelona, Orwell met John McNair of theRest and recuperation
Orwell returned to England in June 1937, and stayed at the O'Shaughnessy home at Greenwich. He found his views on the Spanish Civil War out of favour. Kingsley Martin rejected two of his works and Gollancz was equally cautious. At the same time, the communist ''Morning Star (British newspaper), Daily Worker'' was running an attack on ''The Road to Wigan Pier'', taking out of context Orwell writing that "the working classes smell"; a letter to Gollancz from Orwell threatening libel action brought a stop to this. Orwell was also able to find a more sympathetic publisher for his views in Fredric Warburg of Secker & Warburg. Orwell returned to Wallington, which he found in disarray after his absence. He acquired goats, a cockerel (rooster) he called Henry Ford and a poodle puppy he called Marx; and settled down to animal husbandry and writing ''Homage to Catalonia''. There were thoughts of going to India to work on ''The Pioneer (newspaper), The Pioneer'', a newspaper in Lucknow, but by March 1938 Orwell's health had deteriorated. He was admitted to Preston Hall, Aylesford, Preston Hall Sanatorium at Aylesford, Kent, a British Legion hospital for ex-servicemen to which his brother-in-law Laurence O'Shaughnessy was attached. He was thought initially to be suffering from tuberculosis and stayed in the sanatorium until September. A stream of visitors came to see him, including Common, Heppenstall, Plowman and Cyril Connolly. Connolly brought with him Stephen Spender, a cause of some embarrassment as Orwell had referred to Spender as a "pansy friend" some time earlier. ''Homage to Catalonia'' was published by Secker & Warburg and was a commercial flop. In the latter part of his stay at the clinic, Orwell was able to go for walks in the countryside and study nature. The novelist Leo Myers, L. H. Myers secretly funded a trip to French Morocco for half a year for Orwell to avoid the English winter and recover his health. The Orwells set out in September 1938 via Gibraltar and Tangier to avoid Spanish Morocco and arrived at Marrakech. They rented a villa on the road to Casablanca and during that time Orwell wrote ''Coming Up for Air''. They arrived back in England on 30 March 1939 and ''Coming Up for Air'' was published in June. Orwell spent time in Wallington and Southwold working on a Charles Dickens, Dickens essay and it was in June 1939 that Orwell's father, Richard Blair, died.Second World War and ''Animal Farm''
At the outbreak of theJura and ''Nineteen Eighty-Four''
''Animal Farm'' had particular resonance in the post-war climate and its worldwide success made Orwell a sought-after figure. For the next four years, Orwell mixed journalistic work—mainly for ''Tribune'', ''The Observer'' and the ''Manchester Evening News'', though he also contributed to many small-circulation political and literary magazines—with writing his best-known work, ''Final months and death
Orwell's health continued to decline after the diagnosis of tuberculosis in December 1947. In mid-1949, he courted Sonia Brownell, and they announced their engagement in September, shortly before he was removed to University College Hospital in London. Sonia took charge of Orwell's affairs and attended him diligently in the hospital. Sonia was a beauty, and her act of marrying a sick wealthy man, when his death was almost certain, has left many to doubt her intentions. In September 1949, Orwell invited his accountant Harrison to visit him in hospital, and Harrison claimed that Orwell then asked him to become director of GOP Ltd and to manage the company, but there was no independent witness. Orwell's wedding took place in the hospital room on 13 October 1949, with David Astor as best man. Orwell was in decline and was visited by an assortment of visitors including Muggeridge, Connolly, Lucian Freud, Stephen Spender, Evelyn Waugh, Paul Potts, Anthony Powell, and his Eton tutor Anthony Gow. Plans to go to the Swiss Alps were mooted. Further meetings were held with his accountant, at which Harrison and Mr and Mrs Blair were confirmed as directors of the company, and at which Harrison claimed that the "service agreement" was executed, giving copyright to the company. Orwell's health was in decline again by Christmas. On the evening of 20 January 1950, Potts visited Orwell and slipped away on finding him asleep. Jack Harrison visited later and claimed that Orwell gave him 25% of the company. Early on the morning of 21 January, an artery burst in Orwell's lungs, killing him at age 46. Orwell had requested to be buried in accordance with the Anglican rite in the graveyard of the closest church to wherever he happened to die. The graveyards in central London had no space, and so in an effort to ensure his last wishes could be fulfilled, his widow appealed to his friends to see whether any of them knew of a church with space in its graveyard. David Astor lived in Sutton Courtenay, Oxfordshire, and arranged for Orwell to be interred in the churchyard of All Saints' Church, Sutton Courtenay, All Saints' there. Orwell's gravestone bears the epitaph: "Here lies Eric Arthur Blair, born June 25th 1903, died January 21st 1950"; no mention is made on the gravestone of his more famous pen name. Orwell's adopted son, Richard Blair (patron), Richard Horatio Blair, was brought up by Orwell's sister Avril. He is patron of The Orwell Society. In 1979, Sonia Brownell brought a High Court action against Harrison when he declared an intention to subdivide his 25 percent share of the company between his three children. For Sonia, the consequence of this manoeuvre would have made getting overall control of the company three times more difficult. She was considered to have a strong case, but was becoming increasingly ill and eventually was persuaded to settle out of court on 2 November 1980. She died on 11 December 1980, aged 62.Literary career and legacy
During most of his career, Orwell was best known for his journalism, in essays, reviews, columns in newspapers and magazines and in his books of reportage: ''Literary influences
In an autobiographical piece that Orwell sent to the editors of ''Twentieth Century Authors'' in 1940, he wrote: "The writers I care about most and never grow tired of are: William Shakespeare, Shakespeare, Jonathan Swift, Swift, Henry Fielding, Fielding, Charles Dickens, Dickens, Charles Reade, Gustave Flaubert, Flaubert and, among modern writers, James Joyce, T. S. Eliot and D. H. Lawrence. But I believe the modern writer who has influenced me most is W. Somerset Maugham, whom I admire immensely for his power of telling a story straightforwardly and without frills." Elsewhere, Orwell strongly praised the works ofBrilliant as this book is as a novel, and a piece of brilliant literature, it is probably most valuable as an interpretation of the Moscow "confessions" by someone with an inner knowledge of totalitarian methods. What was frightening about these trials was not the fact that they happened—for obviously such things are necessary in a totalitarian society—but the eagerness of Western intellectuals to justify them.Other writers Orwell admired included: Ralph Waldo Emerson, George Gissing, Graham Greene, Herman Melville, Henry Miller, Tobias Smollett, Mark Twain, Joseph Conrad, and Yevgeny Zamyatin. He was both an admirer and a critic of Rudyard Kipling, praising Kipling as a gifted writer and a "good bad poet" whose work is "spurious" and "morally insensitive and aesthetically disgusting," but undeniably seductive and able to speak to certain aspects of reality more effectively than more enlightened authors. He had a similarly ambivalent attitude to G. K. Chesterton, whom he regarded as a writer of considerable talent who had chosen to devote himself to "Roman Catholic propaganda", and to Evelyn Waugh, who was, he wrote, "ab[ou]t as good a novelist as one can be (i.e. as novelists go today) while holding untenable opinions".
Orwell as literary critic
Throughout his life Orwell continually supported himself as a book reviewer. His reviews are well known and have had an influence on literary criticism. He wrote in the conclusion to his 1940 essay on Charles Dickens, George Woodcock suggested that the last two sentences also describe Orwell. Orwell wrote a critique of George Bernard Shaw's play ''Arms and the Man#Critical acclaim, Arms and the Man''. He considered this Shaw's best play and the most likely to remain socially relevant, because of its theme that war is not, generally speaking, a glorious romantic adventure. His 1945 essay ''In Defence of P.G. Wodehouse'' contains an amusing assessment of Wodehouse's writing and also argues that his broadcasts from Germany (during the war) did not really make him a traitor. He accused Ministry of Information (United Kingdom), The Ministry of Information of exaggerating Wodehouse's actions for propaganda purposes.Food writing
In 1946, the British Council commissioned Orwell to write an essay on British food as part of a drive to promote British relations abroad. In the essay titled ''British Cookery,'' Orwell described the British diet as "a simple, rather heavy, perhaps slightly barbarous diet" and where "hot drinks are acceptable at most hours of the day". He discusses the ritual of breakfast in the UK, "this is not a snack but a serious meal. The hour at which people have their breakfast is of course governed by the time at which they go to work." He wrote that Tea in the United Kingdom, high tea in the United Kingdom consisted of a variety of savoury and sweet dishes, but "no tea would be considered a good one if it did not include at least one kind of cake”, before adding ”as well as cakes, Biscuit#Confectionery biscuits, biscuits are much eaten at tea-time”. Orwell included a recipe for marmalade, a popular British spread on bread. However, the British Council declined to publish the essay on the grounds that it was too problematic to write about food at the time of Rationing in the United Kingdom, strict rationing in the UK. In 2019, the essay was discovered in the British Council's archives along with the rejection letter. The British Council issued an official apology to Orwell over the rejection of the commissioned essay.Reception and evaluations of Orwell's works
Arthur Koestler said that Orwell's "uncompromising intellectual honesty made him appear almost inhuman at times". Ben Wattenberg stated: "Orwell's writing pierced intellectual hypocrisy wherever he found it". According to historian Piers Brendon, "Orwell was the saint of common decency who would in earlier days, said his BBC boss Rushbrook Williams, 'have been either canonised—or burnt at the stake'". Raymond Williams in ''Politics and Letters: Interviews with New Left Review'' describes Orwell as a "successful impersonation of a plain man who bumps into experience in an unmediated way and tells the truth about it". Christopher Norris (critic), Christopher Norris declared that Orwell's "homespun empiricist outlook—his assumption that the truth was just there to be told in a straightforward common-sense way—now seems not merely naïve but culpably self-deluding". The American scholar Scott Lucas has described Orwell as an enemy of the Left. John Newsinger has argued that Lucas could only do this by portraying "all of Orwell's attacks on Stalinism [–] as if they were attacks on socialism, despite Orwell's continued insistence that they were not". Orwell's work has taken a prominent place in the school literature curriculum in England, with ''Animal Farm'' a regular examination topic at the end of secondary education (GCSE), and ''Nineteen Eighty-Four'' a topic for subsequent examinations below university level (A Levels). A 2016 UK poll saw ''Animal Farm'' ranked the nation's favourite book from school. Historian John Rodden stated: "John Podhoretz did claim that if Orwell were alive today, he'd be standing with the neo-conservatives and against the Left. And the question arises, to what extent can you even begin to predict the political positions of somebody who's been dead three decades and more by that time?" In ''Orwell's Victory'', Christopher Hitchens argues: "In answer to the accusation of inconsistency Orwell as a writer was forever taking his own temperature. In other words, here was someone who never stopped testing and adjusting his intelligence". John Rodden points out the "undeniable conservative features in the Orwell physiognomy" and remarks on how "to some extent Orwell facilitated the kinds of uses and abuses by the Right that his name has been put to. In other ways there has been the politics of selective quotation." Rodden refers to the essay "Why I Write", in which Orwell refers to the Spanish Civil War as being his "watershed political experience", saying: "The Spanish War and other events in 1936–37, turned the scale. Thereafter I knew where I stood. Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written directly or indirectly ''against'' totalitarianism and ''for'' democratic socialism as I understand it." (emphasis in original) Rodden goes on to explain how, during the McCarthy era, the introduction to the Signet edition of ''Animal Farm'', which sold more than 20 million copies, makes use of selective quotation:"[''Introduction'']: If the book itself, ''Animal Farm'', had left any doubt of the matter, Orwell dispelled it in his essay ''Why I Write'': 'Every line of serious work that I've written since 1936 has been written directly or indirectly against Totalitarianism ....'Fyvel wrote about Orwell: "His crucial experience [...] was his struggle to turn himself into a writer, one which led through long periods of poverty, failure and humiliation, and about which he has written almost nothing directly. The sweat and agony was less in the slum-life than in the effort to turn the experience into literature."
[''Rodden'']: dot, dot, dot, dot, the politics of ellipsis. 'For Democratic Socialism' is vaporized, just like Winston Smith did it at the Ministry of Truth, and that's very much what happened at the beginning of the McCarthy era and just continued, Orwell being selectively quoted."
Influence on language and writing
In his essay "Politics and the English Language" (1946), Orwell wrote about the importance of precise and clear language, arguing that vague writing can be used as a powerful tool of political manipulation because it shapes the way we think. In that essay, Orwell provides six rules for writers:# Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print. # Never use a long word where a short one will do. # If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out. # Never use the passive where you can use the active. # Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent. # Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.Orwell worked as a journalist at ''The Observer'' for seven years, and its editor David Astor gave a copy of this celebrated essay to every new recruit. In 2003, literary editor at the newspaper Robert McCrum wrote, "Even now, it is quoted in our style book". Journalist Jonathan Heawood noted: "Orwell's criticism of slovenly language is still taken very seriously." Andrew N. Rubin argues that "Orwell claimed that we should be attentive to how the use of language has limited our capacity for critical thought just as we should be equally concerned with the ways in which dominant modes of thinking have reshaped the very language that we use." The adjective "
"We may be heading not for general breakdown but for an epoch as horribly stable as the slave empires of antiquity. James Burnham's theory has been much discussed, but few people have yet considered its ideological implications—this is, the kind of world-view, the kind of beliefs, and the social structure that would probably prevail in a State which was at once unconquerable and in a permanent state of 'cold war' with its neighbours."
Modern culture
In 2014, a play written by playwright Joe Sutton titled ''Orwell in America'' was first performed by the Northern Stage theatre company in White River Junction, Vermont. It is a fictitious account of Orwell doing a book tour in the United States (something he never did in his lifetime). It moved to off-Broadway in 2016. Orwell's birthplace, a bungalow inStatue
A statue of George Orwell, sculpted by the British sculptor Martin Jennings, was unveiled on 7 November 2017 outside Broadcasting House, the headquarters of the BBC. The wall behind the statue is inscribed with the following phrase: "If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear". These are words from his proposed preface to ''Animal Farm'' and a rallying cry for the idea of free speech in an open society.Personal life
Childhood
Jacintha Buddicom's account, ''Eric & Us'', provides an insight into Blair's childhood.Jacintha Buddicom ''Eric & Us'' Frewin 1974. She quoted his sister Avril that "he was essentially an aloof, undemonstrative person" and said herself of his friendship with the Buddicoms: "I do not think he needed any other friends beyond the schoolfriend he occasionally and appreciatively referred to as 'CC'". She could not recall him having schoolfriends to stay and exchange visits as her brother Prosper often did in holidays.Relationships and marriage
Buddicom and Blair lost touch shortly after he went to Burma and she became unsympathetic towards him. She wrote that it was because of the letters he wrote complaining about his life, but an addendum to ''Eric & Us'' by Venables reveals that he may have lost her sympathy through an incident which was, at best, a clumsy attempt at seduction. Mabel Fierz, who later became Blair's confidante, said: "He used to say the one thing he wished in this world was that he'd been attractive to women. He liked women and had many girlfriends I think in Burma. He had a girl in Southwold and another girl in London. He was rather a womaniser, yet he was afraid he wasn't attractive."Stephen Wadhams ''Remembering Orwell'' Penguin Books 1984 Brenda Salkield (Southwold) preferred friendship to any deeper relationship and maintained a correspondence with Blair for many years, particularly as a sounding board for his ideas. She wrote: "He was a great letter writer. Endless letters, and I mean when he wrote you a letter he wrote pages." His correspondence with Eleanor Jacques (London) was more prosaic, dwelling on a closer relationship and referring to past rendezvous or planning future ones in London and Burnham Beeches. When Orwell was in the sanatorium in Kent, his wife's friend Lydia Jackson visited. He invited her for a walk and out of sight "an awkward situation arose." Jackson was to be the most critical of Orwell's marriage toSocial interactions
Orwell was noted for very close and enduring friendships with a few friends, but these were generally people with a similar background or with a similar level of literary ability. Ungregarious, he was out of place in a crowd and his discomfort was exacerbated when he was outside his own class. Though representing himself as a spokesman for the common man, he often appeared out of place with real working people. His brother-in-law Humphrey Dakin, a Hail fellow well met, "Hail fellow, well met" type, who took him to a local pub in Leeds, said that he was told by the landlord: "Don't bring that bugger in here again." Adrian Fierz commented "He wasn't interested in racing or greyhounds or pub crawling or shove ha'penny. He just did not have much in common with people who did not share his intellectual interests." Awkwardness attended many of his encounters with working-class representatives, as with Pollitt and McNair, but his courtesy and good manners were often commented on. Jack Common observed on meeting him for the first time, "Right away manners, and more than manners—breeding—showed through." In his tramping days, he did domestic work for a time. His extreme politeness was recalled by a member of the family he worked for; she declared that the family referred to him as "Stan Laurel, Laurel" after the film comedian. With his gangling figure and awkwardness, Orwell's friends often saw him as a figure of fun. Geoffrey Gorer commented "He was awfully likely to knock things off tables, trip over things. I mean, he was a gangling, physically badly co-ordinated young man. I think his feeling [was] that even the inanimate world was against him." When he shared a flat with Heppenstall and Sayer, he was treated in a patronising manner by the younger men. At the BBC in the 1940s, "everybody would pull his leg"Sunday Wilshin in Stephen Wadhams ''Remembering Orwell'' Penguin Books 1984 and Spender described him as having real entertainment value "like, as I say, watching a Charlie Chaplin movie". A friend of Eileen's reminisced about her tolerance and humour, often at Orwell's expense. One biography of Orwell accused him of having had an authoritarian streak. In Burma, he struck out at a Burmese boy who, while "fooling around" with his friends, had "accidentally bumped into him" at a station, resulting in Orwell falling "heavily" down some stairs. One of his former pupils recalled school corporal punishment, being beaten so hard he could not sit down for a week. When sharing a flat with Orwell, Heppenstall came home late one night in an advanced stage of loud inebriation. The upshot was that Heppenstall ended up with a bloody nose and was locked in a room. When he complained, Orwell hit him across the legs with a shooting stick and Heppenstall then had to defend himself with a chair. Years later, after Orwell's death, Heppenstall wrote a dramatic account of the incident called "The Shooting Stick" and Mabel Fierz confirmed that Heppenstall came to her in a sorry state the following day. Orwell got on well with young people. The pupil he beat considered him the best of teachers and the young recruits in Barcelona tried to drink him under the table without success. His nephew recalled Uncle Eric laughing louder than anyone in the cinema at a Charlie Chaplin film. In the wake of his most famous works, he attracted many uncritical hangers-on, but many others who sought him found him aloof and even dull. With his soft voice, he was sometimes shouted down or excluded from discussions. At this time, he was severely ill; it was wartime or the austerity period after it; during the war his wife suffered from depression; and after her death he was lonely and unhappy. In addition to that, he always lived frugally and seemed unable to care for himself properly. As a result of all this, people found his circumstances bleak. Some, like Michael Ayrton, called him "Gloomy George", but others developed the idea that he was an "English secular saint". Although Orwell was frequently heard on the BBC for panel discussion and one-man broadcasts, no recorded copy of his voice is known to exist.Lifestyle
Orwell was a heavy smoker, who rolled his own cigarettes from strong Shag (tobacco), shag tobacco, despite his bronchial condition. His penchant for the rugged life often took him to cold and damp situations, both in the long term, as in Catalonia and Jura, and short term, for example, motorcycling in the rain and suffering a shipwreck. Described by ''The Economist'' as "perhaps the 20th century's best chronicler of Culture of England, English culture", Orwell considered fish and chips, association football, football, the pub, strong tea, cut-price chocolate, Cinema of the United Kingdom, the movies, and radio among the chief comforts for the working class. He advocated a patriotic defence of a British way of life that could not be trusted to intellectuals or, by implication, the state: Orwell enjoyed strong tea—he had Fortnum & Mason's tea brought to him in Catalonia. His 1946 essay, "A Nice Cup of Tea", appeared in the ''Evening Standard, London Evening Standard'' article on how to Tea in the United Kingdom, make tea, with Orwell writing, "tea is one of the mainstays of civilisation in this country and causes violent disputes over how it should be made", with the main issue being whether to put tea in the cup first and add the milk afterward, or the other way round, on which he states, "in every family in Britain there are probably two schools of thought on the subject". He appreciated English beer, taken regularly and moderately, despised drinkers of lager, and wrote about an imagined, ideal Pub, British pub in his 1946 ''Evening Standard'' article, "The Moon Under Water". Not as particular about food, he enjoyed the wartime "Victory Pie" and extolled canteen food at the BBC. He preferred traditional English dishes, such as roast beef, and kippers. His 1945 essay, "In Defence of English Cooking", included Yorkshire pudding, crumpets, English muffin, muffins, innumerable Biscuit#Commonwealth of Nations and Europe, biscuits, Christmas pudding, shortbread, various List of British cheeses, British cheeses and Oxford marmalade. Reports of his Islington days refer to the cosy afternoon tea table. His dress sense was unpredictable and usually casual. In Southwold, he had the best cloth from the local tailor, but was equally happy in his tramping outfit. His attire in the Spanish Civil War, along with his size-12 boots, was a source of amusement. David Astor described him as looking like a prep school master, while according to the Special Branch dossier, Orwell's tendency to dress "in Bohemian fashion" revealed that the author was "a Communist". Orwell's confusing approach to matters of social decorum—on the one hand expecting a working-class guest to dress for dinner, and on the other, slurping tea out of a saucer at the BBC canteen—helped stoke his reputation as an English eccentric.Views
Religion
Orwell was an atheist who identified himself with the humanism, humanist outlook on life. Despite this, and despite his criticisms of both religious doctrine and religious organisations, he nevertheless regularly participated in the social and civic life of the church, including by attending Church of England Holy Communion. Acknowledging this contradiction, he once said: "It seems rather mean to go to HC [Holy Communion] when one doesn't believe, but I have passed myself off for pious & there is nothing for it but to keep up with the deception." He had two Anglican marriages and left instructions for an Anglican funeral. Orwell was also extremely well-read in Biblical literature and could quote lengthy passages from the Book of Common Prayer from memory. His extensive knowledge of the Bible came coupled with unsparing criticism of its philosophy, and as an adult he could not bring himself to believe in its tenets. He said in part V of his essay, " Such, Such Were the Joys", that "Till about the age of fourteen I believed in God, and believed that the accounts given of him were true. But I was well aware that I did not love him." Orwell directly contrasted Christianity with secular humanism in his essay "Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool", finding the latter philosophy more palatable and less "self-interested". Literary critic James Wood (critic), James Wood wrote that in the struggle, as he saw it, between Christianity and humanism, "Orwell was on the humanist side, of course—basically an unmetaphysical, English version of Albert Camus, Camus's philosophy of perpetual godless struggle." Orwell's writing was often explicitly critical of religion, and Christianity in particular. He found the church to be a "selfish [...] church of the landed gentry" with its establishment "out of touch" with the majority of its communicants and altogether a pernicious influence on public life. In their 1972 study, ''The Unknown Orwell'', the writers Peter Stansky and William Abrahams noted that at Eton Blair displayed a "sceptical attitude" to Christian belief. Crick observed that Orwell displayed "a pronounced anti-Catholicism". Evelyn Waugh, writing in 1946, acknowledged Orwell's high moral sense and respect for justice but believed "he seems never to have been touched at any point by a conception of religious thought and life." His contradictory and sometimes ambiguous views about the social benefits of religious affiliation mirrored the dichotomies between his public and private lives: Stephen Ingle wrote that it was as if the writer George Orwell "vaunted" his unbelief while Eric Blair the individual retained "a deeply ingrained religiosity".Politics
Orwell liked to provoke arguments by challenging the status quo, but he was also a traditionalist with a love of old English values. He criticised and satirised, from the inside, the various social milieux in which he found himself—provincial town life in ''A Clergyman's Daughter''; middle-class pretension in ''Keep the Aspidistra Flying''; preparatory schools in "Such, Such Were the Joys"; and some socialist groups in ''Spanish Civil War and socialism
The Spanish Civil War played the most important part in defining Orwell's socialism. He wrote to Cyril Connolly from Barcelona on 8 June 1937: "I have seen wonderful things and at last really believe in Socialism, which I never did before." Having witnessed the success of the Anarcho-syndicalism, anarcho-syndicalist communities, for example in Anarchist Catalonia, and the subsequent brutal suppression of the anarcho-syndicalists, anti-Stalin communist parties and revolutionaries by the Soviet Union-backed Communists, Orwell returned from Catalonia a staunch anti-Stalinism, Stalinist and joined the BritishThe Second World War
Orwell was opposed to rearmament against Nazi Germany and at the time of the Munich Agreement he signed a manifesto entitled "If War Comes We Shall Resist"—but he changed his view after the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact and the outbreak of the war. He left the ILP because of its opposition to the war and adopted a political position of "revolutionary patriotism". On 21 March 1940 he wrote a review of Adolf Hitler's ''Mein Kampf'' for ''''Tribune'' and post-war Britain
Orwell joined the staff of ''Tribune (magazine), Tribune'' magazine as literary editor, and from then until his death, was a left-wing (though hardly orthodox) Labour-supporting democratic socialist. On 1 September 1944, writing about the Warsaw uprising, Orwell expressed in ''Tribune'' his hostility against the influence of the alliance with the USSR over the allies: "Do remember that dishonesty and cowardice always have to be paid for. Do not imagine that for years on end you can make yourself the boot-licking propagandist of the sovietic regime, or any other regime, and then suddenly return to honesty and reason. Once a whore, always a whore." According to Newsinger, although Orwell "was always critical of the 1945–51 Labour government's moderation, his support for it began to pull him to the right politically. This did not lead him to embrace conservatism, imperialism or reaction, but to defend, albeit critically, Labour reformism." Between 1945 and 1947, with A. J. Ayer and Bertrand Russell, he contributed a series of articles and essays to ''Polemic (magazine), Polemic'', a short-lived British "Magazine of Philosophy, Psychology, and Aesthetics" edited by the ex-Communist Humphrey Slater.Collini, Stefan (2006).Sexuality
Sexual politics plays an important role in ''Nineteen Eighty-Four''. In the novel, people's intimate relationships are strictly governed by the party's Nineteen Eighty-Four#Sexual repression, Junior Anti-Sex League, by opposing sexual relations and instead encouraging artificial insemination. Personally, Orwell disliked what he thought as misguided middle-class revolutionary Emancipation, emancipatory views, expressing disdain for "every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniacs". Orwell was also openly against homosexuality, at a time when such prejudice was common. Speaking at the 2003 George Orwell Centenary Conference, Daphne Patai said: "Of course he was homophobic. That has nothing to do with his relations with his homosexual friends. Certainly, he had a negative attitude and a certain kind of anxiety, a denigrating attitude towards homosexuality. That is definitely the case. I think his writing reflects that quite fully." Orwell used the homophobic epithets "nancy" and "pansy", for example, in expressions of contempt for what he called the "pansy Left", and "nancy poets", i.e. left-wing homosexual or bisexual writers and intellectuals such as Stephen Spender and W. H. Auden. The protagonist of ''Keep the Aspidistra Flying'', Gordon Comstock, conducts an internal critique of his customers when working in a bookshop, and there is an extended passage of several pages in which he concentrates on a homosexual male customer, and sneers at him for his "nancy" characteristics, including a lisp, gay lisp, which he identifies in detail, with some disgust. Stephen Spender "thought Orwell's occasional homophobic outbursts were part of his rebellion against the public school".Biographies of Orwell
Orwell's will requested that no biography of him be written, and his widow, Sonia Brownell, repelled every attempt by those who tried to persuade her to let them write about him. Various recollections and interpretations were published in the 1950s and 1960s, but Sonia saw the 1968 ''Collected Works'' as the record of his life. She did appoint Malcolm Muggeridge as official biographer, but later biographers have seen this as deliberate spoiling as Muggeridge eventually gave up the work.D.J. Taylor ''Orwell: The Life''. Henry Holt and Company. 2003. In 1972, two American authors, Peter Stansky and William Abrahams, produced ''The Unknown Orwell'', an unauthorised account of his early years that lacked any support or contribution from Sonia Brownell. Sonia Brownell then commissioned Bernard Crick, a professor of politics at the University of London, to complete a biography and asked Orwell's friends to co-operate. Crick collated a considerable amount of material in his work, which was published in 1980, but his questioning of the factual accuracy of Orwell's first-person writings led to conflict with Brownell, and she tried to suppress the book. Crick concentrated on the facts of Orwell's life rather than his character, and presented primarily a political perspective on Orwell's life and work. After Sonia Brownell's death, other works on Orwell were published in the 1980s, particularly in 1984. These included collections of reminiscences by Audrey Coppard and Crick and Stephen Wadhams. In 1991, Michael Shelden, an American professor of literature, published a biography. More concerned with the literary nature of Orwell's work, he sought explanations for Orwell's character and treated his first-person writings as autobiographical. Shelden introduced new information that sought to build on Crick's work.Gordon Bowker – ''Orwell and the biographers'' in John Rodden ''The Cambridge Companion to George Orwell'' Cambridge University Press 2007 Shelden speculated that Orwell possessed an obsessive belief in his failure and inadequacy. Peter Davison (professor), Peter Davison's publication of the ''Complete Works of George Orwell'', completed in 2000, made most of the Orwell Archive accessible to the public. Jeffrey Meyers, a prolific American biographer, was first to take advantage of this and published a book in 2001 that investigated the darker side of Orwell and questioned his saintly image. ''Why Orwell Matters'' (released in the United Kingdom as ''Orwell's Victory'') was published by Christopher Hitchens in 2002. In 2003, the centenary of Orwell's birth resulted in biographies by Gordon Philip Bowker, Gordon Bowker and D. J. Taylor, both academics and writers in the United Kingdom. Taylor notes the stage management which surrounds much of Orwell's behaviour and Bowker highlights the essential sense of decency which he considers to have been Orwell's main motivation.Review: ''Orwell by DJ Taylor and George Orwell by Gordon Bowker'' Observer on Sunday 1 June 2003 In 2018 Ronald Binns published the first detailed study of Orwell's years in Suffolk, ''Orwell in Southwold''.Bibliography
Novels
* 1934 – ''Nonfiction
* 1933 – ''Notes
References
Sources
* Anderson, Paul (ed.). ''Orwell in Tribune: 'As I Please' and Other Writings''. Methuen/Politico's 2006. * Joxe Azurmendi, Azurmendi, Joxe (1984): George Orwell. 1984: Reality exists in the human mind, ''Jakin (magazine), Jakin'', 32: 87–103. * Philip Bounds, Bounds, Philip. ''Orwell and Marxism: The Political and Cultural Thinking of George Orwell''. I.B. Tauris. 2009. * Gordon Bowker (writer), Bowker, Gordon. ''George Orwell''. Little Brown. 2003. * Buddicom, Jacintha. ''Eric & Us''. Finlay Publisher. 2006. * Caute, David. ''Dr. Orwell and Mr. Blair'', Weidenfeld & Nicolson. * Bernard Crick, Crick, Bernard. ''George Orwell: A Life''. Penguin. 1982. * Peter Davison (professor), Davison, Peter; Angus, Ian; Davison, Sheila (eds.). 2000 ''A Kind of Compulsion''. London: Random House * Flynn, Nigel. ''George Orwell''. The Rourke Corporation, Inc. 1990. * Haycock, David Boyd. ''I Am Spain: The Spanish Civil War and the Men and Women who went to Fight Fascism''. Old Street Publishing. 2013. * Christopher Hitchens, Hitchens, Christopher. ''Why Orwell Matters''. Basic Books. 2003. * Hollis, Christopher. ''A Study of George Orwell: The Man and His Works''. Chicago: Henry Regnery Co. 1956. * Larkin, Emma. ''Secret Histories: Finding George Orwell in a Burmese Teashop''. Penguin. 2005. * Lee, Robert A. ''Orwell's Fiction''. University of Notre Dame Press, 1969. * Leif, Ruth Ann. ''Homage to Oceania. The Prophetic Vision of George Orwell''. Ohio State U.P. [1969] * Meyers, Jeffery. ''Orwell: Wintry Conscience of a Generation''. W.W. Norton. 2000. * John Newsinger, Newsinger, John. ''Orwell's Politics''. Macmillan. 1999. * . * * Rodden, John (ed.). ''The Cambridge Companion to George Orwell''. Cambridge. 2007. * Michael Shelden, Shelden, Michael. ''Orwell: The Authorized Biography''. HarperCollins. 1991. * Smith, D. & Mosher, M. ''Orwell for Beginners''. 1984. London: Writers and Readers Publishing Cooperative. * D. J. Taylor, Taylor, D. J. ''Orwell: The Life''. Henry Holt and Company. 2003. * West, W. J. ''The Larger Evils''. Edinburgh: Canongate Press. 1992. (Nineteen Eighty-Four – The truth behind the satire.) * West, W. J. (ed.). ''George Orwell: The Lost Writings''. New York: Arbor House. 1984. * Raymond Williams, Williams, Raymond. ''Orwell'', Fontana/Collins, 1971 * Wood, James. "A Fine Rage." ''The New Yorker''. 2009. 85(9):54. * George Woodcock, Woodcock, George. ''The Crystal Spirit''. Little Brown. 1966.Further reading
* Morgan, W. John, 'Pacifism or Bourgeois Pacifism? Huxley, Orwell, and Caudwell'. Chapter 5 in Morgan, W. John and Guilherme, Alexandre (Eds.), ''Peace and War-Historical, Philosophical, and Anthropological Perspectives'', Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, pp, 71–96. . * Orwell, George. ''Diaries'', edited by Peter Davison (professor), Peter Davison (W. W. Norton & Company; 2012) 597 pages; annotated edition of 11 diaries kept by Orwell, from August 1931 to September 1949. * * Ostrom, Hans and Halton, William. ''Orwell's "Politics and the English Language" in the Age of Pseudocracy'' (New York: Routledge, 2018) * Wilson, S. M. and Huxtable, J. ''"Such, Such Were the Joys: graphic novel"'' (London: Pluto Press, Sept 2021)External links