For Those Interested in Orwell

This is fascinating. Pip and Jenny, I'll send you an abridged version. Any other younger readers should perhaps await their parents' approval. HeadGirl will be as interested as I am, I think. Equuschick will be interested but sad, and Equuschick seldom chooses to do sad.

George Orwell married his first wife, Eileen O'Shaughnessy, when she was about thirty years old, and she died on an operating table nine years later. Until recently very little has been known about her or the Orwell's lives in this time period, but this changed when:

A previously unknown cache of Eileen's letters came to light in the early part of this year. Written between 1936 and 1941, without salutations and signed off with the nick-name "Pig", they are addressed to her friend Norah Myles (née Symes) whom she had met at St Hugh's College, Oxford, in the mid-1920s.

Instantly a puzzle that has irked generations of Orwell-fanciers is solved. This is the reference in one of Eileen's last letters to Orwell from March 1945, in which she worries over who might look after their adopted son Richard in the event of her death. "Norah & Quartus would have him & bring him up but you have never seen either of them. Quartus is in India & I can't arrange it." "Quartus" is Quartus St Leger Myles, a Bristol GP, whom Norah married in 1933. But the Eileen-Norah correspondence has an importance far beyond the identification of bit-part players in Orwell's life (Norah, it turns out, met him twice and thought him "rather intimidating"). They illuminate Orwell's first marriage with an occasionally rather startling clarity. They also establish Eileen definitively as a person in her own right - witty, ironic, able to extract humour from the most unpromising situations, demonstrating almost from sentence to sentence why Orwell wanted to marry her.

Needless to say, from the biographer's point of view - especially the biographer who has already published his biography - all this is on the one hand tremendously exciting and, on the other, unbelievably frustrating. You spends four years or so trying to penetrate the carapace of someone who at the time remained resolutely impenetrable, only for new evidence to come rolling along to suggest a radically revised view of your subject. All you can console yourself with is the fact that this is a habitual drawback of the biographer's craft. That cache of long-lost photographs, that rapt, incriminating letter - these things invariably turn up 10 minutes after the page proofs have been signed off.

There are several generous excerpts from the letters and Mrs. Orwell was indeed a delightfully witty writer:

"I lost my habit of punctual correspondence during the first few weeks of marriage," Eileen explains, "because we quarrelled so continuously & really bitterly that I thought I'd save time & just write one letter to everyone when the murder or separation had been accomplished."

There are more than a few passing references to violations of the sixth commandment, although none of them are explicit or graphic. She and her brother shared a close sibling bond that shines through in the letters, and it is thus heartbreaking when he goes missing during WWI. Like nearly everything I read from the WWI era, I read these excerpts laughing through my tears.

Updated to correct some annoying typographical errors and sweep away some surplus commas, which I tend to sprinkle over my writing with a peppermill.