Orwell’s Life and Work: The Political Context

Abstract

A writer who came of age in the period between the two world wars, Orwell was primarily a journalist and essayist. Upper-class by education, middle-class by background, his sense of responsibility for poverty and inequality motivated him to write. He was a compulsively autobiographical writer, interested in exploring his own emotions. His first novels, Burmese Days (1934), A Clergyman’s Daughter (1935), Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936), and Coming Up for Air (1939) all contain versions of his own life-story. Though interesting and readable, Orwell’s early novels are limited by their imitative forms and autobiographical bias. Yet once he discovered ways to express political ideas in fiction, Orwell wrote two of the most powerful works of the century: the fable Animal Farm (1945) and the anti-utopian satire Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949).