George Orwell: A Life in Letters Read Free

the twentieth century expected to be seen to behave, at least publicly. Pain and suffering were thought to be relative and given that experienced by millions in the two ‘Great’ wars, personal loss, especially natural loss, was felt in context. One suffered in silence. Orwell can strike the casual observer as dour. His close friends likened him to his creation Benjamin, the donkey of Animal Farm . But, as David Astor told the editor, when he was depressed or troubled he would telephone Orwell and ask him to meet him in a local pub because he knew Orwell would make him laugh, would cheer him up. One can almost put this dourness into financial terms. Orwell was often poor – see his letters responding to Jack Common’s pleas for even small sums of money when Orwell was in French Morocco. He even speaks of making do for much of 1936 at The Stores by living on potatoes. Animal Farm earned him good royalties but when he died, and before the huge royalties that flooded in from Nineteen Eighty-Four , at his death he was shown to have £9,909 at probate – perhaps some £250,000 today, the cost of a modest house. But, at the time, he was owed £520 that he had lent to friends: George Kopp £250; Paul Potts £120; Sonia £100; Inez Holden £75; and Jack Common £50.
    It is apparent how hard he worked on his correspondence. It is easy to forget nowadays, when using a personal computer with its facility to copy, paste, and save, that typing letters on a mechanical machine could be hard physical work, especially if, as for Orwell, he had to type when ill in bed. There was a limit as to how many copies could be typed at a time. Thus, if he or Eileen wanted to pass on the same information to more than one person, each one would receive a separate letter and each of those would have to be typed afresh. (See the conclusion to Eileen’s letter to Mary Common, 5 December 1938.) Yet Orwell would patiently type and retype his news in letters to different friends.
    One very significant characteristic of Orwell’s letter-writing, telling something of his generosity of character, is how he would write at length to those he did not know, may never have met, and to whom he owed nothing. The letter above to Richard Usborne, and that to Jessica Marshall written from Hairmyres Hospital on 19 May 1948 are both letters on which he spent considerable time although a brief acknowledgement would have sufficed for most of us.
    Eileen’s letters are completely different in content and style. It is to Eileen we must turn to discover what it was like staying with her husband’s parents at Southwold, what it was like living in their almost primitive cottage at Wallington, and it is to Eileen we turn for irony. She had a fine sense of humour and although both she and Orwell were self-deprecatory, in Eileen this is put with delicious wit.
    Because so much has been published of Orwell’s work and because so many of his letters have survived, we know (or think we know) what to expect. Eileen so often comes as a surprise. There are the lovely letters written to her husband (then working as a war correspondent on the Continent) telling him how their little boy was developing and also her hopes for their future away from London (which Orwell would realise on Jura) and her anxieties about the operation which we now know would bring an end to her life. Eileen also lived a life that we did not know about until the batch of letters to Norah Myles was published in The Lost Orwell and reproduced here. It was known that she went to Chapel Ridding at Windermere in July 1938 but we have never known why – and still do not know. Something of this other side of Eileen is revealed in her letters. One thing that is certain from them is that she had a very affectionate nature.
    A small handful of letters by others than Orwell and Eileen have been included. Each one – such as Jennie Lee’s letter to Miss Goalby on page 68 – illuminates Orwell’s character or his