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.
This volume contains Jameson's previously-written polemics City to Let—Berlin 1932, The Youngest Brother, The Defence of Freedom, and Documents.
Labon, Joanna. “Tracing Storm Jameson”. Women: A Cultural Review, Vol.
8
, No. 1, pp. 33-47.
36, 39-40
This last, which had appeared in Fact in July...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Q. D. Leavis
Here and elsewhere she published on a wide range of authors and literary topics, including Trollope
, Hardy
, Gissing
, Forster
, Orwell
, and Aldous Huxley
; the Anglo-Irish, American, French, Italian, and...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Diana Athill
Part one is the story of the publishing houses that DA
worked with. She begins by explaining that business figures (which someone had mentioned as the key to an interesting book about publishing) would not...
Textual Features
Christine Brooke-Rose
Here CBR
's interest tips strongly away from content towards form, though she acknowledges that an attachment to form that excludes all else is totally withering.
Brooke-Rose, Christine. Invisible Author: Last Essays. Ohio State University Press.
15
For the first time she uses a technique...
Textual Features
Stevie Smith
The title is a parody of a line from Orwell
's Animal Farm.
Spalding, Frances. Stevie Smith: A Critical Biography. Faber and Faber.
227
Textual Features
Marghanita Laski
Through Rachel's conversations with the soldiers, it emerges that the Americans and Russians are vying for control over the offshore island, and the captain suspects that Russians have reached the family before him. ML
uses...
Textual Features
Rose Macaulay
The book concerns the illicit love of Kitty Grammont for her boss at the Ministry of Brains, Nicholas Chester, who is not allowed to marry under the eugenics laws in force in this society of...
Reception
Hannah Arendt
On the whole Arendt's account of the rise of Nazism met with more general assent in the West than her account of the rise of Stalinism. Her leaving out the issue of the oppression of...
Publishing
Elizabeth Taylor
After this story (a near-declaration of love between a married woman and an old friend, which comes to nothing)
Beauman, Nicola. The Other Elizabeth Taylor. Persephone Books.
124
she soon succeeded in placing two more, one of them with Orwell
's Tribune (which...
politics
Eleanor Rathbone
In Homage to Catalonia (1952), George Orwell
accused the duchess in particular of a naïveté born of elite status. Orwell claimed that she did not really believe in the existence of anything outside of the...
politics
W. H. Auden
He became a strongly convinced socialist, though he never, unlike several of his friends, joined the Communist Party. In January 1937 he set out for Spain to offer help—ambulance-driving rather than fighting—to the Republican side...
Jarrett-Macauley, Delia. The Life of Una Marson, 1905-65. Manchester University Press.
157-8
Material Conditions of Writing
Catherine Carswell
During World War Two she broadcast on topics like the evacuation of children from the cities, managing on food rations, and the valuable social contact struck up between neighbours in unpropitious and stressful circumstances. Late...
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.
18 July 1936: The Spanish Civil War began between the Republicans...
National or international item
18 July 1936
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,...
Writing climate item
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...
Writing climate item
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...
Building item
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.
