Francis Wyndham
Sweet And Selfless
The Girl from the Fiction Department: A Portrait of Sonia Orwell
By Hilary Spurling
Hamish Hamilton 208pp £9.99 order from our bookshop
This absorbing biography gallantly sets out to right a wrong and to solve a mystery, triumphantly succeeding in both objectives. It also, despite its brevity, gives a full and fascinating portrait of a complex, strong and puzzling personality – an attractive woman whose selfless nature and bountiful generosity were shadowed and sometimes soured by a tragic lack of self-esteem. As Hilary Spurling writes in her opening paragraph, ‘Sonia Orwell baffled people in her lifetime and afterwards’, and this account of the great wrong that was posthumously done to her reputation ‘is a story about how story-tellers themselves – gossips, fantasists, mythmakers, biographers – can twist and distort the pattern of a life’.
The received version of the life went like this: Sonia Brownell was a voluptuously beautiful blonde of thirty-one when she married George Orwell in 1949. He was fifteen years older and on his deathbed. When he did die a few months later she inherited
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'There are at least two dozen members of the House of Commons today whose names I cannot read without laughing because I know what poseurs and place-seekers they are.'
From the archive, Christopher Hitchens on the Oxford Union.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/mother-of-unions
Chuffed to be on the Curiosity Pill 2020 round-up for my @Lit_Review piece on swimming, which I cannot wait to get back to after 10+ months away https://literaryreview.co.uk/different-strokes https://twitter.com/RNGCrit/status/1351922254687383553
'The authors do not shrink from spelling out the scale of the killings when the Rhodesians made long-distance raids on guerrilla camps in Mozambique and Zambia.'
Xan Smiley on how Rhodesia became Zimbabwe.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/what-the-secret-agent-saw