With fears of autocracy and culture wars at fever pitch, it is no surprise that Orwell is back in the spotlight
, tells the story of Winston Smith, an everyman who embarks on a love affair in defiance of the surveillance state led by Big Brother, the supreme leader, whom some believe Orwell modelled after Josef Stalin. With “telescreens” that snoop on citizens, “thought police” enforcers and a system called “doublethink” in which both everything and the opposite are equally true, Orwell’s fiction has been prescient, invoked to describe the ills of nearly every age.
Two more books are forthcoming, which look more closely at the women in Orwell’s life and work. For all his prescience and scrutiny of tyranny, Orwell was also blind to another sort of repression: towards women. Along with a new biography by D.J. Taylor, a historian, the books draw on letters discovered in the past 20 years between the writer and various paramours, as well as some written by Orwell’s first wife, Eileen, to her best friend.
This philandering had long been known to scholars, less so to the public. In the wake of #MeToo and feminist reassessments of badly behaved male artists, he is “due for a bit of reappraisal from that perspective”, says Stefan Collini, an emeritus professor at the University of Cambridge who recently edited an edition of Orwell’s essays. “Wifedom” depicts a man who relied extensively on women while erasing them from his own writings.
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