The Girl from the Fiction Department: a portrait of Sonia Orwell
Hilary Spurling Hamish Hamilton, 194pp, £9.99
ISBN 0241141656
As far as the George Orwell industry is concerned, Sonia Orwell was pure poison. Married to the great man for only his last few spluttering months in 1949-50, she seized control of his name, his work, his reputation and guarded them like a nasty bulldog.
Charged in Orwell's will with ensuring that there would never be a biography, Sonia executed her duty with an unholy zeal, blocking access to his estate to even the most legitimate and mild-mannered of university scholars. Armed with no qualifications other than a school-leaver's prize from the Convent of the Sacred Heart, Roehampton, she insisted on editing Orwell's Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters - in effect, hanging on to him when he should have belonged to the world. She even managed to insert herself into literary history by becoming the model for Julia, the "girl from the fiction department" who breaks open Winston Smith's life in Nineteen Eighty-Four. In addition to all that, she was a mean drunk who got all shouty the moment anyone dared to disagree with her.
Wrong, wrong, wrong, says Hilary Spurling in this short and resolutely revisionist portrait of the widow Orwell. Spurling, who knew Sonia during the last ten years of her life, believes that her subject has been betrayed by biography. Irritated by not having free access to the estate, Orwell scholars have written up Sonia as a kind of wicked witch when, in fact, she was only doing her duty (and duty was something she took very seriously). She was quite unprepared for the task that Orwell bequeathed to her; it was a burden she came to loathe. Nor did she relish having to make all those fine judgements about which scraps of Orwellian ephemera should go into the Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters and which would be best left out. What's more, she was a generous collaborator, insisting that her junior co-editor share equal billing, even though the publishers were pushing for her name to appear alone on the front of the four volumes.
The best way to de-monster someone is to make them real. Spurling does this by showing us Sonia during the 30 years before she met Orwell.
She was born into a disintegrating colonial family in 1918 and had to negotiate the usual difficulties of being both slightly posh and very poor. Settled back home in London, her mother ran a boarding house in Kensington, while Sonia suffered at the hands of bullying nuns (even in adult life, she could never see one in the street without spitting). What marked her out was her luscious prettiness - all sleepy eyes, fat lips and tea-rose skin - and a driving need to be friends with very clever people.
But Sonia Orwell was always more than an intellectual's moll. Although there were plenty of arty girls who hung around wartime Fitzrovia, keen to sleep with poets, philosophers or artists and even do their laundry, she had the organisational skills - not to mention the typing speeds - to play a more active part in metropolitan intellectual life during the 1940s.
Cyril Connolly recruited her to run the Horizon office and increasingly left the editing of the magazine in her hands. Never a writer herself, she was a shrewd assessor of other people's work. Among her "finds" was Angus Wilson, who later claimed that, without her fierce patronage, he would have remained at the British Museum to the end of his dusty days. As for all those lingering stories about Sonia's high-handedness with star talents such as Louis Aragon, Edmund Wilson and T S Eliot, Spurling convincingly puts them down to male pique. In postwar Britain, men, especially clever ones, did not like being told what to do by a girl who looked as if she had stepped out of a Rubens.
Given Sonia Orwell's eye for office detail, it seems extraordinary how easily she was swindled out of a fortune. Spurling suggests that one remnant of her cradle Catholicism was a need to put her absolute faith in older, authoritative men (Orwell had been one, Connolly another). Whatever the exact reason - she herself hinted that it might have more to do with being abandoned by both her father and her stepfather - Sonia leant far too heavily on her accountant, Jack Harrison, who systematically siphoned off the increasingly valuable Orwell estate. In late middle age, she was obliged to quit her beloved London flat and spend the rest of her days camping out in friends' spare rooms.
Spurling, however, has no wish to turn Sonia Orwell's story into a plea for sympathy, and puts on record her extraordinary talent for friendship. She had, says Spurling, "almost a genius for localising wants and needs people didn't even know they had". Armed with flowers, champagne or just the right book, she would bustle into someone else's life and make it seem brighter and more manageable. Never a mother herself - her second brief marriage was to the homosexual Michael Pitt-Rivers - she turned herself into a fairy godmother to other people's children.
In this wonderful book, Hilary Spurling pulls off something remarkable. She succeeds in showing that biography, to be gripping, does not always need to be on the lookout for flaws and dirty secrets. Instead, it can be celebratory and restorative, a force for good.
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