BOOK REVIEW: The Girl from the fiction department by Hilary Spurling

AS GEORGE Orwell lay dying of tuberculosis in 1949, Sonia Brownell finally accepted his proposal of marriage. A few months later Evelyn Waugh remarked, "George Orwell is dead, and Mrs Orwell presumably a rich widow." Orwell immortalised her as Julia in Nineteen Eighty-Four, but in the two decades since her own death, posterity has not been kind to Sonia Orwell. The popular image is that she was a talentless hanger-on who slept her way round London’s pre-War artistic circles, latched on to Cyril Connolly’s Horizon magazine, then saw a perfect opportunity in Orwell, spending the rest of her life cashing in on his fame and the mounting royalties from Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm. Even her chosen surname is held against her; for Orwell was of course only the author’s pseudonym.

Against such a barrage of criticism, some kind of balance is surely called for. And we now have it. Spurling was a friend of Sonia’s, and so her portrait is clearly sympathetic. It is not, however, merely flattering. Rather, Spurling makes an overwhelmingly convincing case, based on fact, that Sonia Orwell has been deeply misunderstood. In fact, one might even guess that the lasting view of her will be that of Stephen Spender, who described Sonia’s social gatherings at her South Kensington home in the 1960s as "the closest thing London possessed to a literary salon". Sonia had no great creative talent of her own, but she fostered the talents of many others, notably Jean Rhys. She is a figure in the background of numerous lives - not only Orwell and Connolly, but also her great friend and drinking companion Francis Bacon, and her best female friend for many years, Marguerite Duras. In an eventful life that saw her dating African rulers and nightclubbing with Jean-Paul Sartre, Orwell was a brief interlude, but a crucial one, not only for her posthumous reputation but also for the woman herself, since it was Orwell’s legacy, Spurling argues, that ultimately killed her.

In unpicking the legend, the first issue is the wealth that Sonia supposedly married. As Spurling points out, Orwell in 1949 was no great catch. Nineteen Eighty-Four was published to glowing reviews and became the best-seller that established Orwell’s fame, but the book only began to make large amounts of money in its later paperback editions, reaching sales of a million copies per year. The man Sonia married was no meal ticket. He was a widower with an adopted son, whose brief affair with Sonia was a somewhat desperate escape from loneliness.

The real love of Sonia’s life, she always said, was the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty. He, however, took the very French view of staying with his wife, while expecting Sonia to be his mistress. Merleau-Ponty had already driven a girl to her death, described by the girl’s best friend, Simone de Beauvoir, in Memoirs Of A Dutiful Daughter. Sonia did not go so far, but when Merleau-Ponty finally ditched her, she was a woman in need of some new purpose in life. Orwell, her brief companion from a couple of years earlier, was that purpose.

He believed that marriage to Sonia would cure him of tuberculosis. The plan was for them to go to a sanatorium in Switzerland, together with Lucien Freud. Orwell would write, Sonia would edit. She never loved Orwell; but one might argue that the deal she entered was all the more admirable, or else simply foolish, if neither love nor money were major factors. It doesn’t take a Relate counsellor to see that the marriage would never have worked; but in any case, four days before they were due to fly to Switzerland, Orwell died.

In his last months, Orwell’s affairs were tidied up in a way that ultimately proved harmful to Sonia. A company called George Orwell Productions was set up to handle all the royalties. Sonia was paid an allowance from this, which by 1977 reached 750 a month. That was a tidy sum; but still not what you might expect to earn from book sales that numbered in millions. And as Orwell’s literary executor, Sonia was determined to honour a wish he expressed perfectly clearly. Once, reading a biography of Joseph Conrad written by the author’s widow, Orwell threw it across the room, saying, "Never do that to me". Orwell stated in his will that there should be no authorised biography, and Sonia did all she could to abide by his wishes. "Orwell had put her in an impossible position," says Spurling, "but it was her reputation, not his, that suffered."

Throughout the Seventies, interest grew in Orwell’s greatest book, and Sonia turned down lucrative Hollywood film deals, and proposals for theatre adaptations. Sonia’s refusals, as Spurling notes, only fuelled the animosity against her. She gave in, though, to calls for an authorised biography by Bernard Crick after an unauthorised one appeared. Crick, for his part, found Sonia greedy and unscrupulous, setting the tone for subsequent Orwell biographers.

Sonia was not just part of George Orwell’s life, though. She flits through the pages of countless biographies, and novels too. As well as Julia in Nineteen Eighty-Four, she is the shrewd and efficient Ada in Anthony Powell’s Books Do Furnish A Room, the bossy Elvira in Angus Wilson’s Anglo-Saxon Attitudes, and the sad, cynical Diana in Marguerite Duras’s Les Petits Chevaux de Tarquinie. She was the Euston Road Venus, painted by artists such as Victor Pasmore and Bill Coldstream, who were among the first of her lovers; she was the hard-headed editor at Horizon magazine and then at the publishers Weidenfeld and Nicholson, launching the British careers of American writers including Saul Bellow and Norman Mailer. Latterly, she was the weary saloniste of South Kensington, kept going by gin and by her neighbours Francis Bacon and Ivy Compton-Burnett, while locked in a legal battle with her accountant. Having unknowingly signed over a significant portion of her shares in George Orwell Productions, she found she no longer had a veto on rights sales. The films and plays could go ahead. Her last act, before her death in 1980, was to sell her home in order to buy back the rights, which she then left to Orwell’s son. She died penniless, and maligned.

Why has she had such a bad press? Undoubtedly she was a difficult woman; she was also a heavy drinker and a tireless bedhopper, whose two marriages (the second to a homosexual country squire) were not for love. Many male literary figures do far worse and get off more lightly. Carole Angier and Diana Athill have both noted Sonia’s touching support for Jean Rhys, while biographers of Orwell and Connolly have preferred to emphasise her flaws. There is a clear split here, between male biographers writing about male subjects, and women discussing female ones. After reading Spurling’s fascinating account of a life that has remained too long in the shadows, it looks as though the women might finally win the day.

Andrew Crumey’s latest novel is Mr Mee