I Belong To The Left: 1945

by George Orwell

On 29 March 1945, Orwell's wife Eileen died, aged 39. Her last, long, very moving letters to her husband are printed here. Less than six months later the novel that she might be said to have nurtured and which gave Orwell world-wide fame, Animal Farm, was published. For a little over three months Orwell worked as a War Correspondent for the Observer and the Manchester Evening News. As well as 74 books specifically reviewed, many others were discussed briefly in essays and in her column 'As I Please'. 'Politics and the English Language', one of Orwell's most important essays, was immediately reprinted for journalists of the Observer and News of the World as a guide to good writing. His defence of P.G. Wodehouse, printed here, was written at a time when Wodehouse was still under a cloud. Essays and articles he wrote for the Observer, Manchester Evening News and Evening Standard are reprinted; correspondence shows he had written the first twelve pages of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Eileen's will and Orwell's first notes for his literary executor are also reproduced. Orwell kept a careful account of what he earned to assist in making his income tax return. Only one such record has survived (for 12 July 1943 to 31 December 1945) and it is reproduced here, fully annotated.

Genres: Nonfiction

502 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 1999

About the author

Eric Arthur Blair was an English novelist, poet, essayist, journalist and critic who wrote under the pen name of George Orwell. His work is characterised by lucid prose, social criticism, opposition to all totalitarianism (both fascism and stalinism), and support of democratic socialism.

Orwell is best known for his allegorical novella Animal Farm (1945) and the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), although his works also encompass literary criticism, poetry, fiction and polemical journalism. His non-fiction works, including The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), documenting his experience of working-class life in the industrial north of England, and Homage to Catalonia (1938), an account of his experiences soldiering for the Republican faction of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), are as critically respected as his essays on politics, literature, language and culture.

Orwell's work remains influential in popular culture and in political culture, and the adjective "Orwellian"—describing totalitarian and authoritarian social practices—is part of the English language, like many of his neologisms, such as "Big Brother", "Thought Police", "Room 101", "Newspeak", "memory hole", "doublethink", and "thoughtcrime". In 2008, The Times named Orwell the second-greatest British writer since 1945.

Reviews

[Susan Paxton · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a magnificent collection of Orwell at the peak of his productivity in 1945. A number of the pieces are familiar - several major essays and a number of book reviews that have previously appeared in the fourth volume of The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters - but a lot of material is previously unseen, including correspondence, book reviews, and the journalism Orwell produced during his brief stint as a war correspondent. Extra detail is provided by the only surviving volume of Orwell's Payments Book, which gives an idea of how much Orwell wrote and what he earned for it.

For Orwell, this was a difficult year - he and his wife Eileen had just adopted a baby and within months she was dead, killed by a reaction to the anesthetic administered for a cancer operation. Yet he kept working hard, spending a couple of months in Germany and France, pounding out reviews and major essays like "The Prevention of Literature," and starting, as he records in a letter here, the first pages of the novel that would become Nineteen Eighty Four, taking home a little over 752 pounds, which must have been the most he had earned in his life to that point. At long last his work was paying off; Animal Farm was on the verge of becoming a major hit, he had another novel under way, his journalism was more in demand than ever - and yet his health was about to fail him. The knowledge of what lay ahead, though, should not affect the sheer pleasure to be found in this brilliantly edited volume.

[Vasil Kolev · Rating 5 out of 5]

This seems the best from all of the completed works until now. There are some really good essays in it (including probably the best, "Politics and the English language"), and there's a lot more context for them, which helps immensely, and I feel something was definitely lost when I read them the first time, separate from the letters, columns, and historical events in which he wrote them.

There are also some letters from his wife just before she died, which show some parts of his domestic life and the tragedy he went through.