The Girl from the Fiction Department: The Widow Orwell

The Girl from the Fiction Department: The Widow Orwell
by Stacy Schiff
New York Times, 15 June 2003

In a life of brilliant passions, Sonia Brownell's 14-week marriage to George Orwell stands out as the lackluster chapter. To the altar the bride trailed a resplendent past. The survivor of an uneasy childhood -- a broken Anglo-Indian home and a posh convent education in England -- she had been her raffish London neighborhood's most popular typist, the inspiration to a young circle of painters known as the Euston Road School, a disciple of Cyril Connolly and later his indispensable editor during the heady days of Horizon magazine, a baby sitter in the Orwell household, a lover of Arthur Koestler, the mistress of the charismatic French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Only after her star turn as the girl in the fiction department -- she was the model for the high-spirited Julia in ''1984'' -- did she become Mrs. George Orwell.

Her husband's marriage proposal may rank as the dreariest of all time. His literary star had risen as his health had declined; he was a semi-invalid when he asked for Sonia's hand by suggesting that she ''learn how to make dumplings.'' He suspected his friends would be horrified at the idea of his taking a new wife, but figured that Sonia's radiant attention could keep him alive. Besides, this steely, saucy, cynical girl was uniquely well qualified to handle a literary estate. (Sonia would be spared Orwell's living legacy. Five years old at the time of his father's death, Richard Orwell was entrusted to an aunt.) The bride reasoned: ''He said he would get better if I married him, so you see, I had no choice.'' There was the tiny detail of her having been recently jilted by Merleau-Ponty, but no matter. If hospital weddings have more logic to them than most, this one was positively syllogistic. The bedridden Orwell donned a smoking jacket for the brief ceremony. The Champagne chilled on a hospital trolley. The wedding party removed to the Ritz to celebrate, minus the groom.

A few months later, Orwell was dead, but the bride would remain Mrs. George Orwell for 30 years, long after she had become Mrs. Michael Pitt-Rivers. If the Orwells had astonished their friends in 1949, Sonia left them gasping in 1958. Husband No. 2 was best known as a defendant in the last of Britain's great homosexual trials. Savage feuds, two suicide attempts and a divorce rather naturally followed. Sonia wound up briefly as a Parisian journal editor -- of the conviction that most problems could be solved ''by a good quotation from Flaubert,'' she was generally happier on the French side of the Channel -- but in the years that followed she held court in a South Kensington salon, framed by the work of two of her intimates, Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon. She responded always to talent, even aging talent, and with verve devoted herself to a series of friends -- Ivy Compton-Burnett, W. H. Auden, Jean Rhys, J. R. Ackerley -- in their last years. She herself ended her days camped out in spare bedrooms and hotels and hospital wards, as broke and addressless as she had begun.

The boldface company could and should not disguise the fact that Sonia Orwell had an enormous capacity for and dedication to work; Julia's 60-hour weeks at the Ministry of Truth were hers, at Horizon and elsewhere. Primarily, she devoted herself to the thankless task of literary executorship. Her critical volumes of Orwell stand as testimony to her editorial talents, which had been questioned only by those men who could not seem to abide the coincidence of talent and beauty in the same tamperproof package. As the Widow Orwell, she assembled a different and more damaging group of detractors, intent on access of another kind. Her husband had bequeathed her a giant millstone in the form of a no-biography clause in his will. This stopped no one.

It is to to settle the score with that crew that Hilary Spurling, author of acclaimed biographies of Ivy Compton-Burnett and Henri Matisse, offers up this portrait. To the table she brings great sensitivity, exemplary research and an agenda, about which she is perfectly clear. She means to retouch the picture of the grasping, greedy, combative Sonia. In her first line, she acknowledges having come to know Mrs. Orwell in the early 1970's. Only in her last chapter does she reveal the extent of their relationship. Sonia was godmother to Spurling's daughter. It was in Spurling's home that Sonia read the page proofs of one of the offending Orwell biographies. Spurling arranged Sonia's funeral. This leaves us somewhere in an awkward land between apologia and memoir, with the former more compelling. (I am not so certain about that plastic salad spinner Sonia bestowed on the Spurling family, which may not carry the point about Sonia's stunning generosity.)

And while Spurling's is a valiant and welcome rescue, there is a ransom to be paid. Sonia's was a beauty of the jaw-dropping variety; even Michael Shelden, happy to write her off as calculating and bossy in his 1991 ''George Orwell,'' pronounced her ''indeed attractive -- she had light brown hair, large eyes and a bright complexion.'' Under Spurling's care, Sonia blossoms into a medieval enchantress: ''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.'' Granted, Shelden has driven Spurling down this fulsome road. He manages to place Sonia in a nightclub with a former lover on the evening Orwell died and, two months later, on the Riviera with another former flame. He makes his point, but so does Spurling, who can be as indulgent as she is rigorous. At various junctures, the reader may wish that she would stop arguing with the umpire and just hit the ball.

Or that she would fill in some conspicuous blanks. Sonia reminds the reader of nothing so much as an English version of Mary McCarthy, with whom she turns out to have feuded. The details of that contretemps do not appear here. Nor does Spurling always see the spades for the spades. ''The trouble between them was still her nostalgia for the absolute, the legacy from a Catholic childhood that Sonia saw as 'the cancer at the heart of so many disastrous love affairs,' '' is, it seems, rather a fancy way of saying that Sonia hoped against hope that Merleau-Ponty would leave his wife for her. And to assert that Orwell's dumpling proposal ''stirred the passionate protective generosity at the root of Sonia's being'' is to broadcast exclusively to Orwell's biographers. Yes, and she was plainly devastated by Merleau-Ponty. On this subject, Sonia was perhaps more quotable than any other: the fact that ''love'' and ''un amour'' ''are not an exact translation of each other,'' she wrote later, ''has caused more confusion between the English and the French than most of the wars of politics and religion.''

In the gentlest of resurrections, Sonia Orwell comes off as a desperate heroine cooked up by Jean Rhys and Edith Wharton on a rainy afternoon. If she fails to rise to the green velvet heights that Spurling sets for her, she remains formidable, more than a tad tortured, a woman of fierce devotions and equally fierce aversions, no less interesting for being, as one friend noted, ''unspeakably unhappy.'' She paid dearly for what she loved most, which is one definition of nobility. On all counts, the best epitaph for her may be that uttered by a Marguerite Duras character, closely modeled on Sonia: ''Literature can be as fatal as anything else; you can't get over it.''

Stacy Schiff is a director's fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. She is at work on a book about Benjamin Franklin's years in Paris.

Note: The copyright for this article is held by the original content creator.

Share \| Translate This Page	The Girl from the Fiction Department: The Widow Orwell by Stacy Schiff New York Times, 15 June 2003 In a life of brilliant passions, Sonia Brownell's 14-week marriage to George Orwell stands out as the lackluster chapter. To the altar the bride trailed a resplendent past. The survivor of an uneasy childhood -- a broken Anglo-Indian home and a posh convent education in England -- she had been her raffish London neighborhood's most popular typist, the inspiration to a young circle of painters known as the Euston Road School, a disciple of Cyril Connolly and later his indispensable editor during the heady days of Horizon magazine, a baby sitter in the Orwell household, a lover of Arthur Koestler, the mistress of the charismatic French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Only after her star turn as the girl in the fiction department -- she was the model for the high-spirited Julia in ''1984'' -- did she become Mrs. George Orwell. Her husband's marriage proposal may rank as the dreariest of all time. His literary star had risen as his health had declined; he was a semi-invalid when he asked for Sonia's hand by suggesting that she ''learn how to make dumplings.'' He suspected his friends would be horrified at the idea of his taking a new wife, but figured that Sonia's radiant attention could keep him alive. Besides, this steely, saucy, cynical girl was uniquely well qualified to handle a literary estate. (Sonia would be spared Orwell's living legacy. Five years old at the time of his father's death, Richard Orwell was entrusted to an aunt.) The bride reasoned: ''He said he would get better if I married him, so you see, I had no choice.'' There was the tiny detail of her having been recently jilted by Merleau-Ponty, but no matter. If hospital weddings have more logic to them than most, this one was positively syllogistic. The bedridden Orwell donned a smoking jacket for the brief ceremony. The Champagne chilled on a hospital trolley. The wedding party removed to the Ritz to celebrate, minus the groom. A few months later, Orwell was dead, but the bride would remain Mrs. George Orwell for 30 years, long after she had become Mrs. Michael Pitt-Rivers. If the Orwells had astonished their friends in 1949, Sonia left them gasping in 1958. Husband No. 2 was best known as a defendant in the last of Britain's great homosexual trials. Savage feuds, two suicide attempts and a divorce rather naturally followed. Sonia wound up briefly as a Parisian journal editor -- of the conviction that most problems could be solved ''by a good quotation from Flaubert,'' she was generally happier on the French side of the Channel -- but in the years that followed she held court in a South Kensington salon, framed by the work of two of her intimates, Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon. She responded always to talent, even aging talent, and with verve devoted herself to a series of friends -- Ivy Compton-Burnett, W. H. Auden, Jean Rhys, J. R. Ackerley -- in their last years. She herself ended her days camped out in spare bedrooms and hotels and hospital wards, as broke and addressless as she had begun. The boldface company could and should not disguise the fact that Sonia Orwell had an enormous capacity for and dedication to work; Julia's 60-hour weeks at the Ministry of Truth were hers, at Horizon and elsewhere. Primarily, she devoted herself to the thankless task of literary executorship. Her critical volumes of Orwell stand as testimony to her editorial talents, which had been questioned only by those men who could not seem to abide the coincidence of talent and beauty in the same tamperproof package. As the Widow Orwell, she assembled a different and more damaging group of detractors, intent on access of another kind. Her husband had bequeathed her a giant millstone in the form of a no-biography clause in his will. This stopped no one. It is to to settle the score with that crew that Hilary Spurling, author of acclaimed biographies of Ivy Compton-Burnett and Henri Matisse, offers up this portrait. To the table she brings great sensitivity, exemplary research and an agenda, about which she is perfectly clear. She means to retouch the picture of the grasping, greedy, combative Sonia. In her first line, she acknowledges having come to know Mrs. Orwell in the early 1970's. Only in her last chapter does she reveal the extent of their relationship. Sonia was godmother to Spurling's daughter. It was in Spurling's home that Sonia read the page proofs of one of the offending Orwell biographies. Spurling arranged Sonia's funeral. This leaves us somewhere in an awkward land between apologia and memoir, with the former more compelling. (I am not so certain about that plastic salad spinner Sonia bestowed on the Spurling family, which may not carry the point about Sonia's stunning generosity.) And while Spurling's is a valiant and welcome rescue, there is a ransom to be paid. Sonia's was a beauty of the jaw-dropping variety; even Michael Shelden, happy to write her off as calculating and bossy in his 1991 ''George Orwell,'' pronounced her ''indeed attractive -- she had light brown hair, large eyes and a bright complexion.'' Under Spurling's care, Sonia blossoms into a medieval enchantress: ''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.'' Granted, Shelden has driven Spurling down this fulsome road. He manages to place Sonia in a nightclub with a former lover on the evening Orwell died and, two months later, on the Riviera with another former flame. He makes his point, but so does Spurling, who can be as indulgent as she is rigorous. At various junctures, the reader may wish that she would stop arguing with the umpire and just hit the ball. Or that she would fill in some conspicuous blanks. Sonia reminds the reader of nothing so much as an English version of Mary McCarthy, with whom she turns out to have feuded. The details of that contretemps do not appear here. Nor does Spurling always see the spades for the spades. ''The trouble between them was still her nostalgia for the absolute, the legacy from a Catholic childhood that Sonia saw as 'the cancer at the heart of so many disastrous love affairs,' '' is, it seems, rather a fancy way of saying that Sonia hoped against hope that Merleau-Ponty would leave his wife for her. And to assert that Orwell's dumpling proposal ''stirred the passionate protective generosity at the root of Sonia's being'' is to broadcast exclusively to Orwell's biographers. Yes, and she was plainly devastated by Merleau-Ponty. On this subject, Sonia was perhaps more quotable than any other: the fact that ''love'' and ''un amour'' ''are not an exact translation of each other,'' she wrote later, ''has caused more confusion between the English and the French than most of the wars of politics and religion.'' In the gentlest of resurrections, Sonia Orwell comes off as a desperate heroine cooked up by Jean Rhys and Edith Wharton on a rainy afternoon. If she fails to rise to the green velvet heights that Spurling sets for her, she remains formidable, more than a tad tortured, a woman of fierce devotions and equally fierce aversions, no less interesting for being, as one friend noted, ''unspeakably unhappy.'' She paid dearly for what she loved most, which is one definition of nobility. On all counts, the best epitaph for her may be that uttered by a Marguerite Duras character, closely modeled on Sonia: ''Literature can be as fatal as anything else; you can't get over it.'' Stacy Schiff is a director's fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. She is at work on a book about Benjamin Franklin's years in Paris. Note: The copyright for this article is held by the original content creator.


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