Orwell’s final muse, without the doublespeak

The Girl From the Fiction Department

A Portrait of Sonia Orwell

Hilary Spurling

Counterpoint: 194 pp., $24

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In mid-October of 1949, a bedridden George Orwell, his health broken at 46 by tuberculosis, married a young editor named Sonia Brownell in his London hospital room. Reaction to the nuptials ranged from the puzzled to the deeply skeptical. “Whole affair is slightly macabre and incomprehensible,” journalist Malcolm Muggeridge tartly noted in his diary.

But the gossipy cynics on the literary scene thought they had Orwell’s 31-year-old bride all figured out. The publication of “Nineteen Eighty-Four” that summer had made him the talk of transatlantic intellectual circles, not to mention a bestselling author. Sonia often said she wanted to marry a great man -- and in Orwell, though gaunt, pallid and near death, she had found him.

The marriage lasted a little more than three months; Orwell never left his bed and died in January, leaving Sonia his estate. Though she proved herself a devoted, if combative, steward of his legacy -- she established the George Orwell Archive at London’s University College in 1960 and, eight years later, co-edited the invaluable four volumes of his essays, journalism and letters, which fully revealed Orwell’s dazzling range as a writer -- the charge that Sonia was little more than a mercenary second-rater has never quite come unstuck.

Sonia’s critics are legion. According to them, she married purely for the most venal of reasons: money and fame. They point out that, though legally “Mrs. Sonia Blair” (George Orwell was the pen name of Eric Arthur Blair), she used the surname Orwell to cash in on his posthumous fame. Orwell’s last two biographers, Michael Shelden and Jeffrey Meyers, only amplified Sonia’s flaws. Shelden places her in a London club with an ex-lover the night Orwell died of a lung hemorrhage, a contention that has been fiercely disputed.

To be sure, the truth about Sonia Orwell is complicated. Undoubtedly, she was a polarizing figure, but her role as the heavy in the now-mythic saga of Orwell’s life is largely undeserved. Those who knew her rightly remember Sonia as a vibrant, generous, rather brash woman and a skilled editor who worked on Horizon, Cyril Connolly’s pioneering literary magazine of the 1940s. An ardent Francophile, she counted among her cross-Channel friends French writers Michel Leiris and George Bataille and many of England’s best-known writers and artists, among them Lucian Freud, W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender and Hilary Spurling, whose short, bracing defense of Sonia, “The Girl From the Fiction Department,” seeks to set the record straight about Orwell’s widow.

Spurling has forgone the rigors of biography for a “portrait”; thus, her book, strategically published to coincide with the 100th anniversary of Orwell’s birth last month, is hardly impartial. Emphasizing Sonia’s fragility, Spurling’s openly partisan account too often shades into maudlin excess, reductive psychologizing and overdone description. Sonia, Spurling argues, was nothing less than a helpless victim of Orwell’s fame, her inheritance of his estate a noose hung around her neck “which would eventually destroy her.”

The melodrama of this aside, there is need for a corrective account of her life, even if Spurling goes too far in her defenses of Sonia. That she was troubled is beyond doubt. The topsy-turviness of her early years was especially trying. She was born in India (as was Orwell) in 1918; her father, a freight broker in Calcutta, died when she was only 4 months old, leaving her mother scrambling and penniless. At 6, Sonia was sent off to a convent school, whose punitive rigors, Spurling argues, profoundly affected Sonia’s character. So did a boating calamity in Switzerland (where she spent a year in the mid-’30s), a decisive trauma in Sonia’s life, Spurling says.

Back in England, a scarred Sonia rebelled against her family and fled to London, where she enrolled in a secretarial course. Drifting into the bohemian demimonde of London’s Fitzrovia, she fell in with a group of Bloomsbury-influenced artists, who clamored to paint her. By all accounts, her striking beauty turned many heads. Spurling describes her extravagantly: “She had luxuriant pale gold hair, the coloring of a pink and white tea-rose, and the kind of shapely, deep-breasted, full-hipped figure that would have looked well in close-fitting Pre-Raphaelite green velvet.” Of course, she did not lack for male attention and had affairs with much older men, usually artists or intellectuals, a pattern that endured: “Sonia in pursuit of her genius,” in Spender’s waggish jibe.

But Sonia’s sparkling mind also attracted attention. Consumed by a passion for books and ideas, she impressed nearly everyone who met her with her precocious enthusiasms. Others, however, thought her abrasive and pretentious: Some snorted she was merely an “Art Tart.” Still, at 22, she was bold enough to pitch the newly launched Horizon an outline for an issue on English artists in 1940. In the end, Connolly rejected it, but he had taken a fancy to Sonia, who in turn worshiped the cherubic bon viveur and cosmopolitan tastemaker.

Though employed as a clerk in the Ministry of War Transport for much of World War II, she had become an unofficial editor at Horizon by 1945, writing pieces and sifting through submissions. After the war, she was taken on as a full-time editor and writer. It was through Connolly that Sonia met a frail Englishman and respected Horizon contributor: George Orwell. Recently widowed, Orwell pined for female companionship; he was immediately taken with Sonia’s vivacity and tough-minded forthrightness. In her, Spurling argues, Orwell found the inspiration for Julia, Winston Smith’s outspoken lover in “Nineteen Eighty-Four” -- “the girl from the Fiction Department.” They had a brief affair in 1946, but she rejected Orwell’s hasty marriage proposal.

Sonia’s attentions had turned to the world of Paris’ Left Bank, which was everything postwar London was not: lively, exuberant, pulsing with newfangled ideas and stormy philosophical debates. As Horizon’s liaison, she hooked up with writer Leiris, who introduced to her a galaxy of French thinkers, including the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, with whom she embarked on an affair. It ended unhappily in 1949. Meanwhile, Orwell, holed up on a Scottish island frantically completing “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” had continued his pursuit of her by mail, and she finally accepted his offer of marriage.

It is hardly a surprise that Orwell would have viewed Sonia as a worthy heir. Aware that he might die, he needed someone who could look after his literary affairs, and Sonia’s editorial experience, not to say her tenacity, impressed him. As for Sonia’s reasons, they have inspired much speculation. Love had little to do with it; Sonia, reports Spurling, later said, “He said he would get better if I married him. So you see, I had no choice.” (Many of Orwell’s friends noticed how he brightened in her presence.) Spurling, however, overreaches, floridly writing that she married him for “nobly disinterested motives.”

Orwell’s death in early 1950 devastated Sonia, a fact confirmed by other Orwell biographers (Shelden aside), though a rendezvous with Merleau-Ponty shortly after still excites nasty conjecture. In the 1950s, she worked briefly as a journalist on the Sunday Times, remarrying and later divorcing. She was still in demand as an editor: “They badly need a talent like yours, Sonia,” wrote Mary McCarthy after the launch of the New York Review of Books in 1963. For much of the 1960s, her London home doubled as a salon, with Auden, Spender and Connolly often on hand for long evenings of drink and talk. She lavished money on almost anyone who needed it, and she practically subsidized Jean Rhys for much of the 1970s.

But she was at heart unhappy and restless, and she took to alcohol. The management of Orwell’s estate was ultimately a curse, contends Spurling. Orwell stipulated that there be no biography, but growing cries for a life forced her hand. Today, Sonia’s low standing owes much to the nasty dealings she had with Orwell’s determined biographers, none of whom pleased her. When Bernard Crick questioned the veracity of “Shooting an Elephant,” one of Orwell’s most famous essays, she spat back, “Of course he shot [an] ... elephant. He said he did. Why do you always doubt his ... word!” Whatever her critics have said about her, Sonia’s passion remained undimmed.

For all the fuss made about Sonia’s high living off of the Orwell estate’s riches (“Animal Farm” and “Nineteen Eighty-Four” sold millions), she died penniless in 1980 of a brain tumor. Her accountant had badly managed her financial affairs, so there was barely enough to cover the costs of her funeral. Spurling rightly asks us to view Sonia with sympathy, but the excesses of her book ultimately diminish Sonia. To blame her travails on Orwell’s deathbed wishes seems an easy way out. The role of villain does not suit Sonia, but neither does the one of victim.