George Orwell Studies 10th anniversary issue

GOS Vol. 10, No. 2: A Tenth Anniversary to Celebrate!

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George Orwell Studies celebrates its 10^th anniversary in style with a bumper, 231-page edition packed with Orwellian treats.

The issue begins, unusually, with the responses of Robert Colls, Débora Tavares, Douglas Kerr, Nathan Waddell and Peter Stansky to a series of Orwellian questions (If you had the opportunity to ask the man one question, what would it be? – that sort of thing). And there follow two imaginary interviews with Orwell – by John Newsinger and D.J. Taylor.

This issue’s papers are bursting with original insights – Robin E.R. Bunce on ideology in Nineteen Eighty-Four, Peter Brian Barry on Orwell and Kant, David Everson-Baltas on Norman Podhoretz and Orwell; G. Alexander Denning offers what he calls an ‘incarnational approach’ to Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Darcy Moore’s many seminal GOS articles delving deep into the on-line and off-line archives helped him win, deservedly, the Orwell Society’s Peter Davison Award for his outstanding contribution to Orwell Studies in 2024. In his new paper he simply dazzles, exploring in his uniquely forensic style David Astor and the Observer circle.

Continuing the issue’s lighter, celebratory mood, John Rodden enjoys comparing Aldous Huxley with Orwell. Both men were tall and in an accompanying article John ponders the highs (and lows) of a group of distinguished writers.

As the journal (a peer-reviewed, bi-annual) moves into its second decade it is clearly determined to expand its outreach to the Orwellian scholars of the future. So appropriately in this anniversary issue, GOS launches a new series of articles by students. Nathan Waddell, author of the recently published, A Bright Cold Day, gave his students at Birmingham University this assignment: ‘Rebecca Solnit, in Orwell’s Roses, writes that Orwell knew “how to make room” in his stories “for the small and the subjective inside something big and historic”. Write an essay on the small and/or the big in Orwell’s work.’ GOS now publishes ‘Some thoughts on the bugs crawling through Orwell’s oeuvre’, the outstanding answer provided by Isabel Hanney, who was an undergraduate student at Birmingham from 2021 to 2024.

As link rot and generative AI together construct an automated, distributed memory hole, Dean J. Hill highlights Orwell’s warning that control over the present could fast become control over the terms of truth itself. And Douglas Kerr explores the ‘fascinating intertextual hinterland’ of Orwell’s important text, ‘Inside the whale’ (1940).

L.J. Hurst has put his polymathic knowledge of Orwell to good use in a series of fascinating GOS interviews with Orwell scholars. In this issue, Robert Colls, author of the recently published Orwell: Life and Legacy, answers his challenging questions.

GOS has been lucky in previous issues to run extracts from Ann Kronbergs’ moving collection of short stories, Holding Up His Sky: Stories of Women in the Life of George Orwell. In ‘The Observers’, Orwell’s friend, Inez Holden, hears of the sudden, tragic death of his wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy, while in ‘Rediscovering Eric’, Aunt Lilian, of Ticklerton Court, suddenly realises that George Orwell, the celebrated author of Animal Farm, is her ‘long lost’ Eric Blair.

Raoul Peck’s film Orwell: 2 + 2 = 5, has drawn generally ecstatic reviews from the international corporate media. Darcy Moore applies his deep knowledge of the Orwell canon to his reviewing of the ambitious new documentary.

The role of Ian R. Willison (1926-2025) in the development of Orwellian Studies is too often forgotten. In this issue, John Rodden pays tribute to a friend and colleague.

Then come the book reviews: Ann Kronbergs looks at Eileen O’Shaughnessy in Her Own Words: The Complete Letters of George Orwell’s Wife, edited by Angela Smith and Sylvia Topp; John Newsinger reviews The POUM: Republic, Revolution and Counterrevolution, by Andy Durgan; while in a lengthier review essay Martin Tyrrell considers The Making of a Marxist Philosopher: A Memoir, by Sean Sayers. There’s also a re-evaluation of the much-praised Orwell’s Ghosts, by Laura Beers. And the issue ends, according to tradition, with the diary column for Orwellian enthusiasts by the anonymous ‘New Pitcher’.

Adding to the delights, there’s a wonderful front page collage designed by Alan John and, on the back page, there’s a specially commissioned painting of Barnhill, the farmhouse on the remote Scottish island of Jura where Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four and brought up his son, Richard, by Louth-based artist Trevor Bounford.

Joint editor Richard Lance Keeble notes in an Editorial that the journal has published the work of 121 contributors: ‘No particular line is promoted: so long as a case is argued rigorously, we are happy to carry the article. At the heart of the journal, we hope, is lively debate.’ He continues: ‘And our contents have included not just the conventional academic journal items such as theoretically-based papers, strongly argued articles and book reviews – but interviews, poems, short stories, film reviews, a chatty diary column by an anonymous writer – and specially commissioned drawings and paintings. … Over the years we have, indeed, developed a thriving, collaborative community of Orwellian scholars alongside whom it has been a pleasure to work. Roll on the next 10 years!’

• George Orwell Studies, which is completely independent of the Orwell Society, is edited by Richard Lance Keeble and Tim Crook and published by Abramis, of Bury St Edmunds. For purchase and subscription details see https://www.abramis.co.uk/george-orwell-studies/subs.htm.