Today (21/01/2025) marks 75 years since the death of Eric Arthur Blair, more commonly known as George Orwell. Blair chose the penname “George” as he thought it was “a good round English name”. He was inspired to take the surname “Orwell” after the River Orwell in Suffolk, where he first came to live in 1921 when his family relocated to Southwold. [1]
Orwell was an English novelist, poet, essayist, journalist, polemicist, and critic, whose work is characterised by social criticism and, in turn, his support of democratic socialism. His staunch opposition to totalitarianism is evident in his most famous works, Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949).
In an article in The Guardian, Robert McCrum posited that Nineteen Eighty-Four was “the masterpiece that killed George Orwell”.[2] In March 1945, while away on an assignment, Orwell received news that his wife, Eileen, had died. She had booked herself in for a hysterectomy after living with debilitating uterine bleeding for many years, leaving her anaemic, which made doctors reluctant to perform the operation. As a result, she died of cardiac failure while under anaesthetic. Orwell had not known about her plans to undergo the operation. He was suddenly rendered a widower and single parent to their recently adopted son, Richard. [3]
In need of respite, Orwell set out to live at Barnhill, an abandoned farmhouse on the Scottish island of Jura. Arriving with nothing but a camp bed, a table, several chairs, and a few pots and pans, he was left to face the elements alone during one of the coldest winters of the century. This was particularly risky on account of Orwell’s poor health—he had always suffered with a bad chest, which was worsened by the harsh conditions of the island. Here, he feverishly worked on the first draft of Nineteen Eighty-Four, determined to finish in spite of his illness. The grim circumstances in which the novel was written can perhaps begin the explain its bleakness. You can read more about the novel and its themes here.
Orwell was finally diagnosed with tuberculosis in November 1947, after collapsing while his sister Avril was visiting Barnhill. He began taking a new drug, streptomycin, while at Hairmyres Hospital in Glasgow, which improved his condition enough to allow him to return to Jura and resume work on Nineteen Eighty-Four. He required the isolation of the island to focus on piecing together the mess that the manuscript had become. Ultimately, however, his use of the drug had to stop as he developed toxic epidermal necrolysis. With his health deteriorating once more, he journeyed to a sanatorium at Cranham, Gloucestershire.
In June 1949, Nineteen Eighty-Four was published. It is as though the novel drained the life from him—as it received critical acclaim, his health continued to decline. In the final year of his life, he courted and married Sonia Brownell. The wedding took place in his room at University College Hospital, London. Less than three months later, Orwell suffered a pulmonary artery rupture as a complication of his tuberculosis. He died aged 46.
[1] Dominic Cavendish, “George Orwell: from Animal Farm to Zog, an A-Z of Orwell,” The Telegraph, 2009, accessed 06 January, available at https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/5386673/George-Orwell-from-Animal-Farm-to-Zog-an-A-Z-of-Orwell.html.
[2] Robert McCrum, “The masterpiece that killed George Orwell,” The Guardian, 2009, accessed 06 January 2025, available at https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/may/10/1984-george-orwell.
[3] Ibid.