The Girl from the Fiction Department: A Portrait of Sonia Orwell - Reviews - Book Review

Contemporary Review, Sept, 2002

The Girl from the Fiction Department: A Portrait of Sonia Orwell. Hilary Spurling. Hamish Hamilton. [pounds sterling]9.99. 194 pages. ISBN 0-241-14165-6. The recent spate of biographies of George Orwell, as well as the republication of his works, has necessarily focused attention on Orwell's second wife, the model for his heroine in Nineteen Eighty-Four.

She has received an almost universal 'bad press' at the hands of Orwell's biographers: she was painted as 'cold and grasping'. This short biography sets out to correct what the author regards as a false picture based on 'ignorance, misconception and distortion'. It is based in part on the writer's own friendship with her subject but this does not blind her to Sonia's faults and weaknesses. The central fact of Sonia's life, and her real claim to fame and biographical enquiry, remains her short marriage to Orwell, himself a difficult, if gifted, man and the legacy he left his widow. This biography is based mainly on discussions with Sonia's surviving friends an d on the Orwell Papers. It will undoubtedly fuel a literary cold war that reminds one of that waged round C. S. Lewis' wife, Joy, in which one is either 'for' or 'against'. If this helps give us a more balanced picture than we have had hitherto, it is no bad thing.