George Orwell: A Life in Letters Read Free Page A

medical condition (as does that from Dr Bruce Dick to David Astor on page 433). These few letters help to develop further our picture of Orwell – for example, the unforgettable image of his arrival in Spain just after Christmas 1936: ‘This was George Orwell and his boots arriving to fight in Spain.’ As Jennie Lee explains, ‘He knew he could not get boots big enough’ in Spain and he had come with a spare set hanging round his neck. The problem of getting footwear large enough for his feet came back to haunt him towards the end of his life.
    Taken together, this volume and its companion volume, Orwell’s Diaries , go some way to offering the autobiography that Orwell did not write.
    Peter Davison
    This edition
    Most letters are reproduced in full but their layout has been regularised. I have made a few cuts to avoid repeating what is readily available elsewhere in the selection (for example, Orwell’s instructions for making the journey from London to Barnhill, Jura). Where a cut is made, this is indicated within square brackets. A complete record with the original styling is available in The Complete Works . Addresses from which letters are sent are often shortened and standardised. After each letter is an inconspicuous reference to its source in Complete Works . Such explicatory notes to letters are provided as are deemed to be helpful in a volume of this kind. They are not exhaustive – but, again, Complete Works can usually be consulted for further information.
    Over ninety much-abbreviated biographies of many of those to whom letters were written are given in the Biographical Notes. This will save too-frequent repetition of biographical information and the need to search for such notes where the individuals are first mentioned. Those for whom biographical notes are given are indicated by asterisks after their names in the body of the book. ‘George Orwell’ as we tend to call him, was born Eric Blair. He continued to use his birth names throughout his life. Some of his friends knew him as ‘Eric’, some as ‘George’. His first wife, Eileen, was always Eileen Blair and his son is Richard Blair. In this book, ‘the Blairs’ refers to Orwell’s parents and family and ‘the Orwells’ to George and Eileen as a couple.
    The sources of these letters together with full notes are to be found in The Complete Works of George Orwell and its supplementary volume, The Lost Orwell . The first nine volumes of The Complete Works comprise Orwell’s books. These were published by Secker & Warburg in 1986–1987 and have been printed in paperback since by Penguin Books. Volumes X–XX were published in 1998 and then in paperback (with some supplementary material) in 2000–2002. The supplementary volume was published by Timewell Press in 2006. The facsimile of the extant manuscript of Nineteen Eighty-Four was published in 1984 by Secker & Warburg in London and M&S Press, Weston, Massachusetts. These volumes were edited by Peter Davison and amount to 9,243 pages. It will be evident that this present volume offers only a small proportion of what is to be found in the whole edition to which, of course, further reference might, if necessary, be made.
    In the main the texts of letters are printed as Orwell wrote them. Slight oversights are silently corrected and titles of books and magazines and foreign-language expressions are italicised (something Orwell could not do on a typewriter). Occasionally (as in Complete Works ) Orwell’s typical misspellings are retained but indicated by a superior degree sign (°). References to the Complete Works are given as Volume number in roman figure + item number + page(s), e.g., XIX, 3386, pp. 321–2. References to letters from The Lost Orwell are given similarly but preceded by LO + page numbers; their position in Complete Works follows. References to books listed in ‘A Short List of Further Reading’ are given by the author’s name + page number – e.g. Crick, p. 482, except