by DJ Taylor
Guardian, January 2004
Critic, biographer and novelist DJ Taylor is the author of Orwell: The Life which has won the
Whitbread biography prize and is eligible for the 2003 Whitbread Book of the Year award.
1. Orwell: The Complete Works, Volume XI: A Kind of Compulsion, 1903-1936 by Peter Davison
Professor Davison spent 15 years on his 20-volume collected works.
This volume is recommended as a sample of his painstaking scholarship and
meticulous footnotes (these have to be read to be believed!) all set down
with the lightest and most enthusiastic of touches.
2. Orwell: A Literary Life
by Peter Davison
See above for my opinion of Peter Davison. This
is a 'literary' study rather than the full chronological Monty. Later
biographers, myself included, have thanked God that Professor Davison
didn't choose to go the whole hog.
3. Orwell at Home by
Vernon Richards
The best-known (and best-executed) file of Orwell photographs were taken by his anarchist chum the late Vernon Richards at
Orwell's Islington flat in the winter of 1946. This collects all Richards'
snaps - some of them rarely seen - together with Richards' obituary of
Orwell and essays on Orwell's anarchist leanings by Colin Ward and the
late Nicholas Walter.
4. New Grub Street by
George Gissing
Gissing was England's best novelist, according to
Orwell, and a decisive influence on his work. New Grub Street, first
published in 1891, is a tremendously gloomy account of the late-Victorian
literary marketplace (ominously enough, its hero - like Orwell - dies of
lung trouble) and an obvious forerunner to Orwell's own Keep the
Aspidistra Flying (1936).
5. Infants of the Spring by Anthony Powell
The first volume of Anthony Powell's four-part
memoir, To Keep The Ball Rolling. Powell was one of Orwell's greatest
friends, and kept a close eye on him for the last 10 years of his life.
This contains one of the best sketches of him ever written, including a
deeply weird account of our man, invited to inspect Powell's infant son
John, absent-mindedly leaving a nine-inch Bowie knife in the cradle.
6. George Orwell: A Memoir
by Tosco Fyvel
'Tosco' (TR) Fyvel worked with Orwell on Tribune in the 1940s and succeeded him as the paper's literary editor. This memoir is
full of beguiling biographical asides, and is particularly interesting on
Orwell's occasionally ambiguous attitudes to Jews and Jewishness. In
particular, Fyvel's criticisms of a Tribune piece seem to have convinced Orwell of his anti-semitic tendencies and encouraged him to make amends.
7. The Girl in the Fiction
Department by Hilary Spurling
Spurling's memoir of her great
friend Sonia Brownell, who married Orwell as his second wife across his
death-bed in late 1949. The title refers to Julia in Nineteen Eighty-Four,
for whom Miss B may have been a model. Spurling is horribly partial (many
observers rated Sonia as a gold-digging drunk) but her grasp of milieu and
motivation is first-rate.
8. Orwell: A Life by
Bernard Crick
Authorised by Sonia who died, shortly after it
appeared, wishing she had never countenanced it. Quite why remains a
mystery, as this is groundbreaking stuff, to which all subsequent
biographers have endlessly to refer.
9. The Unknown Orwell by
Peter Stansky and William Abrahams
Not countenanced by Sonia, but
apparently the goad that provoked her into sponsoring Crick. Thoroughly
researched and, even now, turning up many a hare that later scholars have
yet to chase.
10. Eric and Us by
Jacintha Buddicom
Long out of print but an entertaining childhood
memoir written by a neighbour of Orwell's (whom she knew as 'Eric Blair')
from his teenage years in Henley-on-Thames. Orwell's youthful poetry is
much quoted and there are some salutary slaps at the myth of his unhappy
childhood ('a happy smiling boy' Ms Buddicom retrospectively pronounced).
