Reviews of all New Orwell Publications
- The Cambridge Companion to George Orwell John Rodden, reviewed by Peter Davison
- The Unsung Artistry of George Orwell by Loraine Saunders, reviewed by John Rodden and Paul Anderson
The Cambridge Companion to George Orwell by John Rodden, reviewed by Peter Davison
ed. John Rodden, 2007 (hardback 978-0-521-85842-7, £45; paperback 978-0-521-67507-9, £15.99).
Peter Davison
This excellent collection of essays by fifteen Anglo-American scholars, edited by the distinguished Orwell scholar, John Rodden comprises a Chronology, sixteen articles which ‘concentrate on the fiction and documentary writings, but they also cover Orwell’s prose style, his patriotism, his positions on war and pacifism, and his anti-Communism’ (p. xi), and a list of further reading. In the first essay, John Rossi and John Rodden analyse economically and perceptively Orwell’s development as a political writer. Although Orwell himself referred to his BBC years as ‘wasted’, one can (like him) underestimate what he set in train – for example, launching a prototype of the Open University, based on Indian degree syllabuses, attracting very distinguished literary and scientific speakers. Orwell’s suggestion that he was something of a socialist before 1935-6 might refer to his fierce arguing with Eugène Adam in Paris ‘that the Soviet system was the definitive socialism’ (Stephen Wadhams, p. 42).
Gordon Bowker tells a remarkable story of the attempts and frustrations of those essaying to become Orwell’s biographer. He couples this with observations on the nature of ‘English’ biography and analyses the work of six biographers from Crick to the present, concluding that ‘Biographies of Orwell . . . are better regarded as works of informed imagination than photographic realism’ (p. 25). Professor Jonathan Rose argues that Orwell’s writings, ‘taken together, may offer the most comprehensive profile ever produced by one individual’ (p. 28), with ‘his feet planted firmly in two different and antagonistic words’ (p. 29). He refers interestingly to ‘the anonymous anti-war satire, 1920: Dips into the Near Future (p. 31), published originally in The Nation. He gives a very good picture of England in the first half of the twentieth century and draws on some fascinating statistics. Professor Margery Sabin, discussing Down and Out in Paris and London, The Road to Wigan Pier and Homage to Catalonia, subtly teases out the way that Orwell ‘moves the reader outside their own preoccupations’ and perfectly delineates the essential falsity of the Wigan Heritage Museum where ‘The Orwell’ advertises itself as ‘the perfect venue for your wedding or private party’. She is also very good at the need to refrain from taking the first of these as an ‘objective document of historical scholarship’ and analysing Orwell’s attachment to ‘his initial direct experience in Spain’. In the light of these qualities I am reluctant to suggest two slips, but I do so because they seem pervasive. The Road to Wigan Pier was not an ‘assignment from the Left Book Club’, for it was then, as D.J.Taylor puts it, ‘barely a gleam in Gollancz’s eye’ (pp. 174-5). Indeed, in letter to Orwell’s agent of 29 October 1936, Gollancz was driven to asking what it was that Orwell was writing. Referring to Orwell’s retention of his direct experience in Spain, she notes that Orwell wished the political chapters (v and xi) removed to the end of the book as appendixes. She says that though the French translation of 1955 followed Orwell’s instructions, ‘English-language editions continue to interrupt the narrative with the chapters of political analysis’. However, the very volume she refers to, Orwell in Spain (2001), does make the chapters appendixes. This followed my edition of Homage to Catalonia of 1986. I attracted much flak for doing this, much made up for by the Catalans who approved and translated what I had done in their Orwell en España, Barcelona, 2003.
Professor Michael Levenson discusses the four novels of the 1930s arguing that in these Orwell ‘never allowed himself to forget the degraded social reality that surrounded his literary work, a recognition of imminent catastrophe’ (p. 59) for, as he concludes, at the end of the 1930s ‘The form is doomed, as the autonomous individual is doomed, and as “liberal Christian culture” is doomed . . . the age of totalitarianism is imminent’, Yet ‘Orwell’s instinct is to keep writing’ (p. 74). Between these poles, Levenson shows Orwell as a young professional sustaining a career after modernism and in the teeth of social collapse (p. 59), writing of ‘states of emergency within the familiar situations’ in each novel (p. 63). Possibly a word might have been spared for the effect on Orwell’s storytelling of the savage in-house censorship he suffered, especially in A Clergyman’s Daughter. Thus ‘Orwell’s notorious solution’ – Dorothy’s amnesia – which Orwell admitted was ‘an inherent fault of structure’ (pp. 63-4) was not helped by this censorship. Lists of the changes are instructive, especially to Warburton’s attempt to rape Dorothy (p. 41, line 2 of the novel): see CW, 3, 299-302; or, for a shorter list, the Penguin edition, 1986, pp. vi-viii. Professor William E. Cain writes of the special experience of reading Orwell’s essays: ‘bracing, illuminating, invigorating’ (expressions that might, incidentally, be applied to the essays in this Companion). He appositely goes on, ‘It is not the specific judgements Orwell makes as much as the action of his thinking and the movement of his feeling that distinguish him’. He likens Orwell as an essayist to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s ‘man thinking’ (p. 76). Professor Rossi contributes an essay on Orwell’s patriotism: ‘Orwell’s uniqueness among English leftists arose from a residual sense of patriotism, a love of things English that he was never ashamed of’ (p. 89). He argues that ‘Orwell believed that patriotism was the defining element of the English character. Patriotism is something palpable and real, not a useless sentiment’ and that this was underestimated by the Left (p. 95). One minor detail: is it quite correct to say that Orwell’s father ‘held a high level administrative position’ in India in the Opium Department (p. 88)? Michael Shelden describes his service as ‘humble’ (p. 126). It certainly took him over thirty years to progress from 5th to 1st Grade Sub-Deputy Opium Agent just five years before he retired in 1912.
Ian Williams writes on Orwell and the British Left dividing his essay, after an introduction, into seven succinct sections: Striking Back at the Empire: Orwell and Class (p. 101); The Independent Labour Party (p. 103); The Spanish Disconnection (p. 105); The Second World War and Orwell’s Politics (p. 106); Socialist Anti-Soviet (p. 108); The List (p. 108); and finally, Orwell’s Socialism (p. 109). He defends Orwell’s preparation of his List of those too unreliable to write for the Government. One of those he would bar was Peter Smollet (aka Smolka), an NKVD agent awarded the OBE by a grateful if obtuse Government, who was probably responsible for persuading Jonathan Cape not to publish Animal Farm (see The Lost Orwell, pp. 210-11). Robert Conquest in ‘Orwell, Socialism and the Cold War’ is on territory he knows expertly and is particularly interesting on the way Orwell (despite denials by such Marxist critics as Bernard Williams) targets ‘the Stalin régime . . . in great specificity’ (p. 130). Having written ad nauseam about the increasing misuse of the English language along lines Orwell indicated, I was delighted to see Robert Conquest linking this to ‘the present decline of the universities’ (p. 131). Professor Morris Dickstein makes an excellent case that Animal Farm is not ‘Orwell Lite, a kind of Totalitarianism for Beginners’ (p. 134) and shows how ‘the influence of intellectuals distorts the ideals with which the revolutionary movement began’ (p. 137). I am not sure that Orwell would have gone quite so far as to suggest that ‘There is no single tipping point in the inexorable shift from the genuine equality’ of the early Revolution (p. 140). In the copy of Animal Farm that Orwell gave Geoffrey Gorer he marked the pigs eating the milk and apples as the key passage (Crick, p. 490). Professor Goldstein quotes from the 1951 Penguin Animal Farm. Perhaps if he had had the 1989 edition by him, or CW, 18, he would have seen that not only did Orwell tell Dwight Macdonald that this was indeed ‘The turning-point of the story’ (CW, 18, 507; Penguin, p. xix) but that when the story was broadcast as a play by the BBC on 14 and 15 February 1947, he wanted this ‘turning point’ made even clearer, adding four lines of dialogue not in the novel. (I need hardly say, with the arrogance with which we are all familiar, the BBC ignored Orwell’s request.) The lines (last of speech 259 and speeches 260-2), are printed in the Penguin edition, p. xx and CW, 8, p. 153.
Sir Bernard Crick, doyen of Orwell biographers and critics, contributes a fresh and lively essay on Nineteen Eighty-Four: context and controversy’. The novel, he points out, does not have any single message but a series of multiple messages; it is both satire and warning – a difficult mixture to bring off. He discusses Orwell’s satiric rage, the importance of mutual trust – ‘there is a categorical imperative to treat people equally’. He effectively links the novel to ‘The Prevention of Literature’ and suggests that the ‘importance of memory, of mutual trust and of plain language work together as a satire on modern mass-produced writing’ (p. 152). It seems that hearing John R. Baker’s lecture to the PEN Conference, 22-26 August 1944 on how Trofim Denisovich Lysenko (Director of the Soviet Academy of Agricultural Science under Stalin) had provided ‘a vivid illustration of the degradation of science under a totalitarian regime’. Further, that lecture seems to have impelled Orwell into seriously setting about writing the novel (see The Lost Orwell, 2006, which reproduces previously unknown correspondence on Lysenko between Orwell and Dr Cyril Darlington, at the time director of the John Innes Horticultural Institution).
Some years ago I was told that Orwell was now quoted more often than Shakespeare, though no evidence was provided. Neil McLaughlin does not discuss Shakespeare, but his essay, ‘Orwell, the academy and the intellectuals’ gives, and analyses, the results of extensive research into citations of Orwell and his books between 1976 and 2003. He argues, ‘The explanation for the contradiction between Orwell’s non-academic status . . . and his clear but uneven academic reception is sociological’ (p. 169). In discussing ‘Orwell and the literary critics’ he concludes that ‘the Orwell tradition’ will be ‘transformed by new realities but motivated and energised by his concern with writing, ideas, clarity of thought, literary judgement and political principles’ (p. 177). The editor of this Companion offers a very personal essay, ‘Orwell for today’s reader: an open letter’, in which he movingly describes his experience of reading and learning from Orwell despite his having a very different personal, religious, and political stance. He adapts Orwell’s six rules for good writing to six ‘unlessons’ for ‘Politics and the Literary Intelligentsia’. I especially liked his advice to address ‘the informed layperson, the literate public – not merely the literary intelligentsia’ (p. 187). In his penultimate section he argues for learning by doing as Orwell had done (p. 188). This appealed to me because of advice (drawn from Goethe) given by Hermann Bahr in his Expressionism (1916): ‘all our knowledge is only half-knowledge, therefore our knowledge is ever hindering knowledge . . . only by doing does knowledge become complete’.
Erika Gottlieb contributes an informed and critical ‘bibliographic essay’ in which she summarises and analyses the wide range of studies of Orwell and his writing. She is particularly good in placing ‘the voices of political hostility camouflaged as aesthetic criticism’ (p. 194) and she appositely quotes Christopher Hitchens’s statement that it is hard to believe the ‘sheer ill will and bad faith and intellectual confusion [that] appear to ignite spontaneously when Orwell’s name is mentioned in some quarters’ (p. 195). Raymond Williams comes out particularly badly in this analysis. Christopher Hitchens sums up his contribution, ‘Why Orwell still matters’, and the whole of this excellent series of essays, with, ‘It was not a matter of what [Orwell] thought but how he thought, which in turn is the explanation of why he still matters, and always will’ (p. 207).
This is a genuine companion. The essays are sharp and to the point; never outstay their welcome; and, unlike so much academic writing which seems to be more concerned to address a narrow field of fellow academics, is completely free of jargon. Orwell would have been delighted. The single disappointment of this Companion is the ‘Further Reading’ (pp. 208-10). So far as Orwell is concerned it is surprisingly dated. For example, the selection of editions of individual books by Orwell is curious. One almost thinks the compiler plucked personal copies of paperback editions off his or her shelves and recorded their dates of issue (and having two copies of Coming Up for Air, both are listed dated, successively, 1970 then 1950). No reference is made to any of the individual, modern, corrected editions which have now been in print for almost twenty years; several have specially-written introductions and all have notes on their textual problems. Carey’s edition of Orwell’s Essays (2002), has been preferred to the four volumes of essays, fully annotated, published by Penguin in 2001. (Carey only includes Orwell’s own notes and overlooks many of those.) Space might have been found for the facsimile edition of Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984) which shows in his handwriting when Orwell originally set the story – 1982, then 1983, and only, as time went by in the course of illness and composition, 1984. Although The Complete Works is listed, it is only the second, paperback, revised and updated edition, and the date given is only for volumes X, XI, and XII. I reiterate, these are excellent essays, and further editions should be called for. In that case Further Reading should by up-dated, especially the single-volume editions of Orwell’s books (after all, most readers cannot afford the twenty-volume Complete Works), and space found for Gillian Fenwick, George Orwell: A Bibliography (1998), J. R. Hammond, A George Orwell Chronology (2000), Emma Larkin, Secret Histories (2004), the Microform George Orwell: Letters and Documents to be found in Libraries and Archives in the UK (9 reels of microfilm 2004; Reel 2 includes the facsimile of Nineteen Eighty-Four by courtesy of Brown University), The Lost Orwell (2006, the supplementary volume to The Complete Works), and Dan Leab’s valuable study, Orwell Subverted: The CIA and the Filming of ‘Animal Farm’ (2007). It might be useful to mention two collections of Orwell’s essays intended for North American readers, with notes selected from the 2001 Penguin volumes, currently in the press from Harcourt, edited by George Packer: All Art is Propaganda and Facing Unpleasant Facts.
I should like to end on a more positive note so I am taking John Newsinger’s excellent article, ‘Orwell, anti-Semitism and the Holocaust’ last, partly to point to its excellence but also because it raises general and personal issues focusing on ‘what we can be expected to know’. Newsinger writes very fairly and perceptively and I think I learned more from this essay than any other (and that is saying something given the quality of the essays). Perhaps the nub of his argument is that ‘although Orwell knew the “facts” of the Holocaust, that six million Jews had been murdered by the Nazis, he never actually understood either the enormity or the significance of the crime’ There is, he writes, ‘no mention of Auschwitz, Belsen, Buchenwald, no specific discussion of the concentration camps . . ’ (p. 123). In fact, Orwell does refer to Dachau and Buchenwald in ‘Notes on Nationalism’ and his ‘London Letter, 5 June 1945’ (CW, 17, 147 and 163), on the second occasion making the interesting observation that, when he wrote, ‘it is possible now [Orwell’s italics] to rouse a certain amount of indignation about Dachau, Buchenwald etc., and yet before the war it was impossible to get the average person to take the faintest in such things’. Orwell puts these atrocities into the context of the Ukraine famine of 1933 and Soviet concentration camps, which, with other atrocities he lists, are all part of what he sub-titles, ‘Indifference to Reality’ (p. 147). Orwell does pay rather more attention to the persecution of Jews than is suggested in the essay (for example, CW, 14, pp. 32, 234, 246, 271, and 361). Nevertheless, I have no difficulty in going along with John Newsinger’s argument, but one tiny point he made brought me up sharp and raised two issues. At the end of his essay, he asks, ‘it is difficult to believe that [Orwell] never read [Hannah] Arendt’s “The Concentration Camp” that appeared in Partisan Review in July 1948’. But is it? A brief chronology: Orwell wrote the first draft of Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1947, often so ill that he had to work in bed; from 20 December 1947 to 28 July 1948 he was a very sick man in Hairmyres Hospital; he then got back to Jura and on 4 December 1948 he had completed the fair copy – often typing in bed on a manual typewriter – no handy laptops then. He left Jura about 2 January 1949 and from then on was very ill and in two hospitals. He was desperate to complete the novel. I wonder, how much incentive he would have had to get copies of Partisan Review from America? Not just John Newsinger, but do we all expect and demand the impracticable?
Now let me turn the question of Orwell’s ‘omission’ to ourselves. Suppose I wrote, very provocatively, ‘it is difficult to believe that scholars writing in North America had never noticed the up-dating of Orwell editions over the past twenty years’? O.K., I’m being rude, but I cannot but help notice that only one such scholar refers to any of the up-dated books in Penguin and the Complete Works. The single exception refers to Orwell’s wish that chapters v and xi be moved to the end of Homage to Catalonia – but then says that has never been done in English editions, even though it has been done in the very volume from which this request was drawn (see Orwell in Spain, 2001, pp. 169-90 and 190-215) If I am being impertinent, let me turn the spotlight on myself. John Newsinger refers to a service on behalf of Polish Jews held at a synagogue in St John’s Wood in 1943 which Orwell discusses (p, 121). By a curious coincidence I was living at 43 Marlborough Place, bang opposite that synagogue at that time. Further, I was then working at the Crown Film Unit on a film about the submarine service, Close Quarters. The cutting room in which I worked was opposite that of the famous Stewart McAllister, currently editing The Silent Village, a dramatised account of the Lidice massacre set in the Welsh mining village of Cwmgiedd – a Czech not a Jewish atrocity. My mother ran a boarding house mainly for music students but we cared for many Jewish refugees from Austria and Germany – and simultaneously for a short time, men of the Polish Air Force after the Fall of France. Refugees were not just on our doorstep but living and eating with us for several years from the mid 1930s. I still have the Register with the names and home addresses of these exiles from Austria, Germany, Poland, and Iran, etc. I mention this for two reasons. One, though this was so close to my home – in my home – I am pretty sure my knowledge of what the Germans were doing to the Jews was pretty sketchy. Orwell would, of course, have been much better informed than a 16-year-old boy, but so much more seemed to demand immediate attention (something to which I admit with a certain shame). But what strikes me in the context of Newsinger’s article is my mother’s response printed in her memoir, when the police came to take our Jews for internment on the Isle of Man. Yes, she was very angry; yes, she actually got them released and into work which did much to contribute to the war effort. Yet her explanation for their being taken, which did not strike me at the time, was they were being imprisoned ‘because they were Jews’. She who had done – and did – so much for these people still saw them as ‘Jews’. They were taken, of course, because they were German. As Orwell put it, ‘Indifference to Reality’, even by those particularly kindly disposed to our Jewish guests.
John Rodden
John Rodden’s latest book is The Cambridge Companion to Orwell, edited by him. It will be reviewed in this section by Professor Peter Davison. Rodden is also author of The Politics of Literary Reputation: The Making and Claiming of "St. George Orwell", Scenes from an Afterlife: The Legacy of George Orwell, and Every Intellectual’s Big Brother: George Orwell’s Literary Siblings – among other books.
The Unsung Artistry of George Orwell by Loraine Saunders reviewed by John Rodden
Ashgate Publishers
159 pages
ISBN 978-0-7546-6440-6
‘Disclosing the integral aesthetic components of the distinctive style that Orwell developed in his early realistic novels of the 1930s, Loraine Saunders hits just the right note in her literary analysis of Burmese Days, A Clergyman’s Daughter, Keep the Aspidestra Flying and Coming Up for Air. In reminding us of the power and optimism of these neglected writings in Orwell’s oeuvre, Saunders provides an invaluable service: her study serves a much-needed corrective to the established critical tendency to undervalue Orwell’s novelistic artistry and inbstead helps us to appreciate his full achievement and artistic legacy.’
Loraine Saunders’ The Unsung Artistry of George Orwell, reviewed by Paul Anderson
(Ashgate Publishing, £45)
Unlike Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, the four novels George Orwell wrote in the 1930s – Burmese Days, A Clergyman’s Daughter, Keep the Aspidistra Flying and Coming Up for Air – have never enjoyed either great popularity or much in the way of critical reputation.
They were for the most part favourably reviewed when they first appeared, but none sold well. Orwell himself refused to sanction new editions of A Clergyman’s Daughter or Keep the Aspidistra Flying during his lifetime and was scathing about their inadequacies. “They are both thoroughly bad books and I would prefer to see them go out of print,” he wrote to his agent, Leonard Moore, in 1944. Two years later, in a letter to his friend and intellectual sparring-partner George Woodcock, he wrote of Keep the Aspidistra Flying:
There are two or three books which I am ashamed of and have not allowed to be reprinted or translated, and that is one of them. There is an even worse one called A Clergyman’s Daughter. This was written simply as an exercise and I oughtn’t to have published it, but I was desperate for the money, ditto when I wrote Keep the A. At that time I simply hadn’t a book in me, but I was half starved and had to turn out something to bring in £100 or so.
Shortly before his death Orwell dictated a note reiterating that A Clergyman’s Daughter and Keep the Aspidistra Flying should not be reprinted.
Biographers and critics have tended to take a similarly dismissive view of these two novels, treating them as failed minor works, of interest only insofar as they reflect Orwell’s own experiences and show him developing as a writer.
Burmese Days has done better but has been praised more often for its insights into the barbarities of imperialism than for any literary merit. And although some commentators have gone so far as to declare Coming Up for Air Orwell’s best novel on literary grounds, far more treat it as a period piece, important mainly because its themes and characters prefigure those of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four.
For at least 40 years, certainly since the appearance of the Collected Journalism and Letters edited by Ian Angus and Sonia Orwell, writers on Orwell have paid much more attention to his books of reportage, his essays and his everyday journalism than to the four 1930s novels – and particularly since the end of the cold war there has been something approaching a consensus that it is Orwell’s non-fiction, even more than Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, that secures his reputation as one of the greatest writers of the 20th century.
Loraine Saunders has nothing against Orwell’s non-fiction – but she strongly believes that it is a grave mistake to downplay the significance or the quality of the 1930s novels. The Unsung Artistry of George Orwell is, as she writes in her introduction, an extended attempt “at redressing an imbalance in Orwell studies that has insisted Orwell’s reputation as a first-rate novelist must rely solely upon the continued appreciation of his last two works”.
She goes about her task with verve, and many of her arguments are telling. She is surely right that too many writers on Orwell have made the reductionist assumption that he was simply putting his own opinions into the mouths of his fictional protagonists: the expat manager John Flory in Burmese Days, the clergyman’s daughter Dorothy Hare, the would-be poet Gordon Comstock in Keep the Aspidistra Flying, the disillusioned insurance salesman George Bowling in Coming Up for Air. She is right, too, to emphasise the complexity and plurality of authorial voices that sustain the narratives of the novels. She develops these points convincingly with detailed textual references, though perhaps a little too exhaustively for my taste. No matter: it is good to be reminded that, for all the autobiographical elements in Orwell’s 1930s novels, he was writing not autobiography but fiction, and doing so with some subtlety and skill.
Saunders says that Orwell should be understood as a “proletarian novelist”, which on the face of it is problematic: the Old Etonian former colonial policeman was not in any but the most formal Marxist sense proletarian. Although he had no option but to work for a living, his background, tastes, manners and most of his social circle were anything but working-class. None of his novels has more than a walk-on role for a working-class character, and in Nineteen Eighty-Four the workers become the proles, alien creatures (to Winston Smith) whose vulgar subculture somehow survives the triumph of the totalitarian state.
Yet Saunders is on to something important here, even if she doesn’t get it quite right. I don’t think Orwell ever saw himself as a proletarian writer. Nevertheless, he grasped precisely how the downwardly mobile middle class had become formally proletarian – because, like him, its members had nothing to sell but their labour power – but had remained estranged politically, socially and culturally from the working class. In his 1930s novels, Orwell was imagining himself into the shoes of people he believed the socialist movement needed for success but was hopeless at attracting. Saunders argues, rightly I think, that the results are strikingly more effective politically than the overtly propagandist novels of the 1930s by such left-wingers as Edward Upward.
There are a couple of places where Saunders ties herself in knots – her discussion of the extent to which Orwell introduced fictional elements into his books of reportage is hard going, and she explains away Orwell’s dim view of A Clergyman’s Daughter and Keep the Aspidistra Flying rather too easily – and in the end I remain unconvinced that Orwell’s 1930s novels deserve to be considered in the top rank of 20th-century English literature. But The Unsung Artistry of George Orwell is an impressive piece of work that deserves a wide readership – although with a retail price of £45 it is unlikely to get it.
Review Quotes for Eric & Us by Jacintha Buddicom and Dione Venables
“ YOU are noticed more if you stand on your head than if you are the right way up.’ This one quote provides the best early clue in Eric & Us to the developing intellectual perspective of the would-be Famous Writer, George Orwell.”
Henley Standard“..written by Orwell’s childhood friend, ...Jacintha Buddicom was persuaded to write of that time... of poetry and romance.”
The Bookseller“Every now and then something new and hitherto unknown turns up in the bookshops which lifts the chill of a winter day, and that is my reaction on turning the last page of Eric & Us....but it is the Postscript.... which introduces the excitement. The Postscript makes poignant and fascinating reading.”
West Sussex Observer“...These revelations undoubtedly cast new light on Orwell’s life. Aspects of Jacintha probably appear in most of his heroines, and the countryside ramble leading to the sudden pounce does not just figure in his fiction; it remained his preferred mode of seduction.”
The Times Literary Supplement“... she had been thinking of him tremendously often since they had lost touch....She never married. Nobody ever came up to his standard.”
The Sunday Times“....but Venables’ postscript changes all that. It also accounts for a moment in 1974 when, under gentle questioning, Buddicom was asked about the events in Eric & Us...the usually imperturbable woman broke down and cried.”
The Guardian Review“Eric has a bit of a cough. He says it is chronic.” wrote Lillian Buddicom of George Orwell in 1917. Jacintha Buddicom’s book, Eric & Us about Eric Blair’s early life before he took the name of Orwell is claimed to be the only book to cover Orwell’s Shropshire links...Their developing relationship and no doubt some of Orwell’s formative experiences, were played out in Shropshire.”
The Shropshire Star“Throwing new light on why his association with Jacintha ended, she writes of the literary ambitions of the young Orwell and the influences which helped to shape his distinctive style and approach...”
The Oxford Times“This book describes in exquisite detail the childhood friendship of Jacintha Buddicom and Eric Blair. The new postscript...adds fascinating insight into the early life of one of this Country’s most iconic 20th century authors.”
The Best of British“ Indeed it is a memorable book, first published in 1974 which has long been the only secure basis for all the future Orwell books and biographies that have poured out. Yet what it does do is provide a new perspective on why Eric Blair was such an awkward spirit...”
The Camden New Journal“...the most complete account of the great man’s formative years and one which has proved a boon for researchers has now been republished, and it has lost none of its charm.”
This England“A vivid picture of growing up together. Despite the biting satire of George Orwell’s later work, it is surprising to read how happy and peaceful that childhood was, though his dream of marrying Jacintha faded.”
RPM Newsletter“ Jacintha Buddicom’s memoir has already become a valuable resource in the Orwell Archive but for the rest of us, it is a charming and entertaining account of the early years of Eric Blair and his friends, the Buddicoms.
Images Magazine“An unusual sort of biography comes from Dione Venables, who writes of Jacintha Buddicom, the first love of Eric Blair...”
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