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...
Literary responses
P. D. James
The film adapted from the novel by Alfonso Cuarón
, released in Britain in September 2006, was judged by a reviewer to have softened the blow of James's book just a little, even though it...
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...
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...
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
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...
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
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
