Best remembered for having married George Orwell on his death-bed, and as the inspiration for the fearless, bossy Julia in 1984 , Sonia Orwell remains, more than 20 years after her death, a fiercely divisive figure.
To her detractors, she was the quintessential literary groupie, a grasping, pretentious, drunken name-dropper who only married Orwell for his belated fame and the royalties amassing from Animal Farm and 1984; her admirers celebrate her generosity, her selfless passion for writers and the literary life, and the inexhaustible kindness she showed not just to the likes of Jean Rhys, but to innumerable godchildren as well.
Sonia Orwell has endured a fresh battering at the hands of Orwell's recent biographers, and this has prompted Hilary Spurling - a close friend from the last 10 years of her life - to rise to her defence. The Girl from the Fiction Department is a compelling and often touching account of a wretchedly unhappy life; and although Sonia Orwell must have been maddening at times - not least when she broke into French while discussing elevated or artistic matters - it's hard not to feel that she has been roughly treated.
Sonia Brownell was born in Calcutta in 1918. Her father died when she was four; her stepfather took to the bottle, and when the family eventually returned to England, her mother made ends meet by managing boarding-houses. Sonia was sent to the Sacred Heart Convent in Roehampton: she loathed it - so much so that in later life she spat if she passed a nun in the street - and if her Catholic education instilled habits of loyalty and service to others, it also exacerbated feelings of guilt and inadequacy. She left at 17 and, after learning French in Switzerland, did the obligatory secretarial course.
She was, by now, a voluptuous Renoir beauty, blonde, strong-featured and pink-and-white: even then, judging by the photographs, she seldom looked happy. She fell in with the painters of the Euston Road School - William Coldstream and Victor Pasmore among them - for whom she acted as model and mistress. But although the 'Euston Road Venus' was to befriend and champion young artists like Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud, books and writers were her passion, and her consolation.
Cyril Connolly and Peter Watson had founded Horizon in the autumn of 1939, and she was soon working on the magazine as a secretary-cum-editorial assistant - one of a bevy of beautiful young women whom Connolly employed.
Evelyn Waugh, who liked to ridicule the whole set-up, insisted on wearing a bowler hat when visiting the office, and was pleased to note 'Miss Brownell working away with a dictionary translating some rot from the French'. Sonia repelled Connolly's advances, after which he spread rumours that she was a suppressed lesbian: but although she leapt into bed with an army of male admirers, sex probably came a poor second to her adulation of writers, and her longing to serve them.
Uncreative herself, she channelled her energy into editorial work, at Horizon and then at the fledgling firm of Weidenfeld & Nicolson. It's good to learn that she first published Angus Wilson in Horizon, but not surprising: by then Connolly had lost interest, and although Hilary Spurling writes respectfully of his editorial gifts, he was too in awe of established reputations to match John Lehmann or Alan Ross as a spotter of new talent.
When Paris opened up again after the war, Sonia could indulge her francophilia to the full. She consorted with Sartre and Camus; the love of her life was the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and she was devastated when he refused to leave his wife.
Back in London, her frustrated affections homed in on George Orwell, by then dying of TB. She had met him first, with Connolly, in the early years of the war; more recently, she had babysat his son, and gone to bed with him in a dutiful, perfunctory way. She never claimed to be in love with him, and his approach to their marriage was equally unromantic ('learn how to make dumplings' was the gist of his proposal).
To her surprise, she loved him - and missed him - far more than she had ever expected. Despite the taunts of gold-digging, being his literary executor proved a poisoned chalice: uninterested in money and hopelessly unbusinesslike, she was taken for a ride by his accountant, and although she may have been the ultimate difficult literary widow, she found the responsibilities increasingly onerous. And, despite the huge sales of Orwell's books, few of the proceeds came her way.
Her later life makes for melancholy reading. She was briefly married to a rich homosexual landowner, Michael Pitt-Rivers; she shunted between London and Paris, drank too much, grew blowsier and, with typical generosity, organised a whip-round for Connolly's widow and children after he'd left them wretchedly short of funds.
If Sonia needed to be rescued from her detractors, Orwell himself has an abundance of admirers - so much so that, in Orwell's Victory, Christopher Hitchens sometimes feels that he 'requires extricating from a pile of saccharine tablets and moist hankies; an object of sickly veneration and sentimental over-praise'. Though some on the left sought to disparage him as a Cold Warrior, he has been claimed by left-wingers, right-wingers, Little Englanders and old-fashioned liberals; he was also a proto-ecologist, a fervent anti-imperialist, a bit of a homophobe (at least in print) and an advocate of a United States of Europe.
One reason for this, perhaps, was his refusal, or inability, to toe any kind of party line - or entirely suppress those old-fashioned class and social prejudices which sat uneasily with high-minded and leftish views and led him to declare that 'all scoutmasters are homosexual' and, most famously, to savage 'that dreary tribe of high-minded women and sandal-wearers and bearded fruit-juice-drinkers who come flocking towards the smell of "progress" like bluebottles towards a dead cat': as Hitchens points out, 'He had to suppress his distrust and dislike of the poor, his revulsion from the "coloured" masses who teemed through the empire, his suspicion of Jews, his awkwardness with women and his anti-intellectualism.'
Hitchens pounces, rightly, on those on the Left who seem to be on Orwell's side but then round on him for betraying his principles. Orwell was reviled for allegedly claiming, in The Road to Wigan Pier, that 'the working classes smell': Hitchens reminds us that he merely pointed out that this was a widespread belief among the middle classes - and, no doubt, one that he shared himself, if not on the printed page.
While researching a biography of Cyril Connolly, I was surprised - and priggishly shocked - to come across a note from Orwell to his old school friend suggesting that they should review each other's recent books on the age-old grounds of 'You scratch my back. I'll scratch yours'.
Whereas Connolly - idle, greedy, pin-striped, racked with self-pity - seemed to embody the corrupt metropolitan literary world, the haggard, austere, tweed-jacketed Orwell, recently returned from fighting fascism in Spain with a bullet-wound in his throat, was surely a sea-green incorruptible? Not so, it seems - though Queenie Leavis, after observing sourly that he belonged 'by birth and education to the "right Left people", the nucleus of the literary world who christian-name each other and are honour bound to advance each other's literary career,' conceded that 'he differs from them in having grown up'.
Perhaps it all boils down to Orwell's being that familiar item, a man of paradox - and one who, disconcertingly, sometimes fits with an equally familiar cliché about high-minded men of the Left. The great quality of his prose is its commonsensical humanity, its avoidance of chilly abstractions: yet Steven Runciman - another Eton contemporary - once remarked that Orwell had 'pity for the human condition, but not much pity for the individual human' while Hilary Spurling suggests that 'for most of his life, ideas had mattered more to him than people'.
Hitchens has the occasional reservation about his hero - in particular, what he sees as Orwell's wilful and malicious misreading of Auden's poem, 'Spain' - but admires him for his independence, his refusal to compromise, and for being right more often than not.
Orwell's Victory discusses Orwell vis-à-vis the empire, feminism, the Cold War, Englishness and America, and the claims made about him by Stalinists, Tories, Queenie Leavis and French 'deconstructionist' critics: apoplectic readers should shun the pages given to the views of Claude Simon, winner of the 1985 Nobel Prize for Literature, as - to Hitchens's furious indignation - he tries to prove that Homage to Catalonia was 'faked from the very first sentence'. Hitchens's prose lacks Orwell's brevity and clarity, and - as if by contagion - becomes murkier still when he battles with the likes of Raymond Williams; but, like Sonia, he seems on the side of the angels.


The Girl from the Fiction Department
Hilary Spurling
208pp, Hamish Hamilton, £9.99

Orwell's Victory
Christopher Hitchens
Allen Lane, Penguin Press £12.99, pp160