Read other extracts from his book on the novel’s history:
• Big Brother’s long shadow: the legacy of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four
• David Bowie’s Orwell: how Nineteen Eighty-Four shaped Diamond Dogs
George Orwell once said that Nineteen Eighty-Four “wouldn’t have been so gloomy if I had not been so ill”. But the truth is that Orwell, along with many other writers, found plenty to be gloomy about in postwar Britain. As he wrote in one of his London Letters in the New York magazine Partisan Review: “No thoughtful person I know has any hopeful picture of the future.” He was magnifying a widespread sense of bomb-haunted unease rather than projecting on to the world some private torment.
Amid the postwar malaise, Orwell’s friends thought he looked even more gaunt and run-down than usual. His wife, Eileen, had died during a hysterectomy in 1945 and he desperately needed a change. For years, he had dreamed of squirrelling himself away on a Hebridean island; the well-connected Observer editor David Astor recommended Jura in the Inner Hebrides, which had fewer than 300 inhabitants. Robin Fletcher, the laird of Jura, and his wife, Margaret, owned a remote farmhouse, Barnhill, that needed a tenant to save it from ruin. It sounded ideal. Orwell and his sister Avril left London for Jura in May 1946.
Continue reading...from The Guardian http://bit.ly/2LUKB5d
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