About George Orwell
George Orwell was a great writer, known throughout the world for his masterpieces, Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm. The lessons in those books and his other work are as relevant today as they have ever been: most notably that the truth matters and that inconvenient facts are still facts.
His work gives us among the most powerful and frightening pictures of totalitarianism. At the same time his writing is full of humour and humanity, found in his experiences in the imperial police in Burma, as a “down and out” in Paris and London, or fighting for the Republic in the Spanish Civil War.
Born in 1903, Eric Blair (George Orwell was his pen name) was only 46 when he died in 1950 from tuberculosis. He had made a start on his next novel and retained the core beliefs that he had developed during his life. In June 1949, shortly after the publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four and during his final illness Orwell made a statement in the USA:
My novel Nineteen Eighty-Four is not intended as an attack on socialism, or on the British Labor party, but as a show-up of the perversions to which a centralized economy is liable, and which have already been partly realized in Communism and fascism. I do not believe that the kind of society I describe necessarily will arrive, but I believe (allowing of course for the fact that the book is a satire) that something resembling it could arrive…..The scene of the book is laid in Britain in order to emphasise that the English-speaking races are not innately better than anyone else and that totalitarianism, if not fought against, could triumph anywhere.
What would Orwell think today ? Of course we don’t know and we don’t speculate. Read his work and make your own mind up. If you are visiting this website you have probably heard of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. If you haven’t read them then we recommend them to you. We think his other books are also superb: recounting his own experiences in Down and Out in Paris and London, The Road to Wigan Pier and Homage to Catalonia; and his novels, Burmese Days, A Clergyman’s Daughter, Keep the Aspidistra Flying and Coming Up for Air. Any one of the many published volumes of his essays, letters and journalism contains further pleasures and important writing, from a description of the perfect pub or how to make a cup of tea to the dangers of nationalism and how it differs from the patriotism deeply felt by Orwell.
Orwell married his first wife Eileen O’Shaughnessy in 1936, she died in 1945 aged 39 during an operation. Eileen is thought to have been an influence on Orwell’s style of writing, in particular, on Animal Farm, which, according to him, she “even helped in the planning of”. Orwell got married again in 1949, to Sonia Brownell who administered the Orwell estate until her death in 1980.
In 1944 George and Eileen adopted a son, Richard. Richard Blair is Patron of The Orwell Society.
Richard Blair
.. you stop and think: hang on, they’re talking about my father here.”
Read recent article about Richard Blair in the Guardian.