The Girl from the Fiction Department: A Portrait of Sonia Orwell
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"Beautiful, intelligent, and idealistic, Sonia was the model for Julia, heroine of Orwell's 1984. Her friends and admirers included W. H. Auden, Lucian Freud and Frances Bacon. She was Cyril Connolly's indispensable assistant at the influential literary magazine Horizon during the 1940s, and in the 1960s she co-edited the ground-breaking four-volume collection of Orwell's nonfiction writings." But after the failure of her second marriage, Sonia's life began to go wrong, ending in penury and despair due to the burden unwittingly placed on her by George Orwell at his death. Some have since seen her as a mythical heroine; others have depicted her as mean and mercenary. Spurling portrays the real Sonia Orwell in all her generous, spirited, ferocious, and self-doubting complexity.
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