The Girl from the Fiction Department

The Girl from the Fiction Department

A Portrait of Sonia Orwell

Summary

Absorbing and provocative, a biography of George Orwell's controversial second wife from the Whitbread Prize-winning author of Matisse the Master and Anthony Powell

Just three months before his death, the author of Nineteen Eighty-Four took a new wife. Sonia Brownell was model for Julia in Orwell's most famous novel, she was fifteen years younger than her husband, and after his death she was hounded and pilloried as a manipulative gold-digger who would stop at nothing to keep control of the literary legacy. But the truth about Sonia was altogether different.

Beautiful, intelligent and fiercely idealistic, she lived at the heart of London's literary and artistic scene before her marriage to Orwell changed her life for ever. Those who knew her - Lucien Freud and Francis Bacon, Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus - witnessed her great personal generosity. And yet, burdened with the almost impossible task of protecting Orwell's intellectual estate, Sonia's loyalty to her late husband brought her nothing but poverty and despair.

About the author

Hilary Spurling

Hilary Spurling won the Rose Mary Crawshay Prize for The Early Life of Ivy Compton-Burnett 1884-1919, and the Duff Cooper Prize and Heinemann Award for Secrets of a Woman's Heart: The Later Life of Ivy Compton-Burnett 1920-1969. She is also the author of Elinor Fettiplace's Receipt Book, Paper Spirits and The Girl from the Fiction Department: A Portrait of Sonia Orwell. She has been Arts and Literary Editor of the Spectator, and a regular reviewer for the Observer, the New York Times and the Daily Telegraph.
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