Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
George Orwell
-
Standard Name: Orwell, George
Used Form: Eric Blair
Through the mid part of the twentieth century GO
was prominent as a reporter on the social and political scene: he was one of those whose reporting helped to shape opinion and whose accounts now seem vital to understanding those times. Several of his essays have canonical status as much on historical as literary grounds. He published novels as well as non-fiction, but his two most famous novels, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, are continuous in aim and effect with his polemical writing. The impact of these two novels was immediately felt and is still being felt in the twenty-first century.
Despite her singularly unleisured lifestyle, RP
had a remarkable talent for friendship, which extended to people with whom she might be expected to have little in common. Her friendship with Lord David Cecil
brought her...
In April 1946, UM
's English friend Stella Mead
noticed that Marson was not doing well psychologically, and arranged for the writer Clare McFarlane
to take her back to Jamaica with him. Suffering from depression...
Intertextuality and Influence
Deborah Levy
This book has four sections, each titled from a reason for writing, Political Purpose, Historical Impulse, Sheer Egoism, and Aesthetic Enthusiasm. The first and last describe a period of near-breakdown that...
Intertextuality and Influence
Hilary Mantel
Vacant Possession takes up the story ten years later, in the significantly Orwellian
year of 1984, and is described by its author as a state-of-the-nation novel.
Edemariam, Aida. “Interview with Hilary Mantel”. The Guardian, pp. 28-9.
28
Evelyn has died by misadventure, and Muriel is...
Intertextuality and Influence
Zoë Fairbairns
The novel pays homage to George Orwell
, perhaps Britain's most famous dystopian writer. But ZF
explained later, in 1984 came and went, that although she had learned from Orwell she could not quite...
Intertextuality and Influence
Carol Rumens
Several poems delight in the history of spots around nineteenth-century London; others are sonnets; others combine satire with their piercing social observation, such as the dystopian, Orwell
-inspired 2084.
Intertextuality and Influence
Margaret Harkness
John Goode
calls Out of Worka sophisticated response to Engels
's critique [of A City Girl]. . . . Its protagonist becomes the register of vividly rendered experiences of the doss house, the...
Intertextuality and Influence
Patricia Highsmith
In these tales, animals affected by human callousness and cruelty carry out some startling acts of reprisal. As PH
herself puts it, animals get the better of their masters or owners, because the latter merit...
Literary responses
Vera Brittain
Seed of Chaos received little attention in the review journals, but VB
received many hostile letters from outraged Britons, Americans, and Canadians. George Orwell
wrote a two-part review or response in the Tribune denouncing her...
Literary responses
T. S. Eliot
George Orwell
no doubt spoke for a section of Eliot's readership when he wrote in October 1942 of the first three quartets: There is very little in Eliot's later work that makes any deep impression...
Literary responses
Zoë Fairbairns
The Times Literary Supplement reviewer, Frank Pike
, judged the novel ambitious yet unpretentious.
Pike, Frank. “Catching Up: Fiction”. Times Literary Supplement, No. 4003, p. 104.
Pike, Frank. “Catching Up: Fiction”. Times Literary Supplement, No. 4003, p. 104.
104
Literary responses
Graham Greene
George Orwell
, once a colonial policeman himself, criticized the book harshly for its fascination with damnation and suicide. As he put it, Greene harboured the idea, which has been floating around ever since Baudelaire
Literary responses
Edith Sitwell
To George Orwell
, a socially-committed writer of a later generation, this book showed a completely frivolous emphasis on technique, treating literature as a sort of embroidery, almost as though words did not have meanings...
Timeline
February 1936
The awesome trio
Laity, Paul. “The left’s ace of clubs”. Guardian Unlimited.
The Spanish Civil War began between the Republicans (including Communists) and the Fascists led by Francisco Franco
.
March 1940
An essay by George Orwell
, published in Horizon, claimed that popular boys' magazines of this time [stopped] the clock . . . at 1910. Britannia rules the waves, and no one has heard...
1 October 1954
In the Movement, a leading article in the Spectator, identified a newly sceptical and debunking tendency in modern British poetry, opposed to social hierarchy and cultural authority, including that of modernism.
22 January 1984
A commercial, directed by Ridley Scott
and aired during the broadcasting of the Super Bowl (US football championships), announced Apple Computers
' release of the Macintosh computer.
Texts
Orwell, George. Animal Farm. Secker and Warburg, 1945.
Orwell, George. Burmese Days. Harper and Brothers, 1934.
Orwell, George. Down and Out in Paris and London. V. Gollancz ltd , 1933.
Orwell, George. Homage to Catalonia. Secker and Warburg, 1938.
Orwell, George. Keep the Aspidistra Flying. V. Gollancz Ltd. , 1936.
Orwell, George. My Country Right or Left 1940-1943. Editors Orwell, Sonia and Ian Angus, Penguin Books, 1970.
Orwell, George. Nineteen Eighty-Four. Secker and Warburg, 1949.
Orwell, George. Shooting an Elephant: and Other Essays. Secker & Warburg, 1950.
Orwell, George. The Penguin Essays of George Orwell. Penguin in association with Secker and Warburg, 1984.
Orwell, George. The Road to Wigan Pier. Gollancz, 1937.
