If you can get past the layout of a book that runs to 400 pages but really doesn’t need to, with its small italicised print playing tricks with my eyes alongside the bigger font of the main text, then this is a marvellous book that gave me a completely different perspective of Eric (Blair) who answered to his author pseudonym, George. The timing of my reading it was uncanny (around the same time as seeing the “2073” film -see the reviews on this site) as the soothsayer of “1984” and the satirist of “Animal Farm” turns out to be not quite the man I thought he was. You see, as Anna Funder points out in her meticulously researched book (There are a further 46 pages of references), Orwell was man who left his wife, Eileen, within the first year of their marriage, to volunteer to fight in the Spanish Civil War. Eileen followed him there, but her own role in the resistance to Franco has it turns out been virtually airbrushed out by a series of male biographers, something that Ms Funder must take great credit for calling out. Not only that, it turns out that Eileen was the ‘power behind the throne’, typing up ‘Homage to Catalonia’ for example, and a home-maker, fighting grievous ill-health, while George was away philandering and doing his own thing. It makes for an uncomfortable read and says a lot about the times in which they lived.
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