The widow Orwell.

AuthorGlastris, Kukula
PositionBook Review: A Portrait of Sonia Orwell - Book Review

THE GIRL FROM THE FICTION DEPARTMENT: A Portrait of Sonia Orwell by Hilary Spurling Counterpoint Press, $24.00

ON OCTOBER 13, 1949, AT University College Hospital in London where he was being treated for advanced tuberculosis, a 46-year-old George Orwell exchanged wedding vows with Sonia Brownell, a literary editor 15 years his junior, in a simple ceremony with two old friends as witnesses. Four months later, Orwell was dead, and Sonia Brownell Orwell was left as sole heir to his literary estate.

Biographers of George Orwell have since accused his widow of being an opportunist, a sexual adventuress, and a harridan. They have largely cast the sickbed nuptials as a marriage of convenience for the bride, a union that would give her what Orwell himself referred to as a sinecure of "the writer's widow."

Now, in a biography devoted not to her famous husband, but to Sonia Brownell, writer Hilary Spurling, who came to know Sonia in the decade before the latter's death in 1980, attempts to rehabilitate Sonia Orwell's reputation. Spurling portrays not a gold digger but a devoted spouse and talented editor who had significant intellectual influence on the author of 1984.

Spurling paints a picture of an engaging and complicated woman who despite her verve, her loyalty, generosity, and intelligence, her passion for art and literature, was huge !y insecure, convinced she was fundamentally unworthy.

Like her famous husband, Sonia Brownell was born to a colonial family in India. It was a fractured, tragic childhood. Her father died when she was just four months old--rumored to have committed suicide--and her mother remarried, only to have that marriage unravel as her new husband spiraled downward into alcoholism. Also like Orwell, Sonia was sent away to boarding school in England, at Sacred Heart Convent in Roehampton--and suffered the same existence (deep loneliness, the contempt for the students without money) that Orwell would later describe in his 1947 essay "Such, Such Were the Joys."

Yet as much as she despised the nuns' despotic rule at the convent, she also credited her Jesuitical training with teaching her one crucial lesson: that ideas have enormous power. It was a lesson that led her, after leaving Sacred Heart, to flee her bourgeois roots to live amongst the Bloomsbury poets, writers, and painters in Fitzrovia in 1940s London. A great beauty, she had no shortage of male admirers and lovers from whom she learned more about art and literature...

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