The Complete Novels of George Orwell
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George Orwell: The Complete Novels
Eric Arthur Blair (George Orwell) was born in 1903 in India, where his father worked for the Civil Service. The family moved to England in 1907 and in 1917 Orwell entered Eton, where he contributed regularly to the various college magazines. From 1922 to 1927 he served with the Indian Imperial Police in Burma, an experience that inspired his first novel, Burmese Days (1934). Several years of poverty followed. He lived in Paris for two years before returning to England, where he worked successively as a private tutor, schoolteacher and bookshop assistant, and contributed reviews and articles to a number of periodicals. Down and Out in Paris and London was published in 1933. In 1936 he was commissioned by Victor Gollancz to visit areas of mass unemployment in Lancashire and Yorkshire, and The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) is a powerful description of the poverty he saw there. At the end of 1936 Orwell went to Spain to fight for the Republicans and was wounded. Homage to Catalonia is his account of the civil war. He was admitted to a sanatorium in 1938 and from then on was never fully fit. He spent six months in Morocco and there wrote Coming Up for Air. During the Second World War he served in the Home Guard and worked for the BBC Eastern Service from 1941 to 1943. As literary editor of Tribune he contributed a regular page of political and literary commentary, and he also wrote for the Observer and later for the Manchester Evening News. His unique political allegory, Animal Farm, was published in 1945, and it was this novel, together with Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), which brought him world-wide fame.
George Orwell died in London in January 1950. A few days before, Desmond MacCarthy had sent him a message of greeting in which he wrote: ‘You have made an indelible mark on English literature… you are among the few memorable writers of your generation.’
George Orwell:
The Complete Novels
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BookishMall.com
Published by the Penguin Group
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Animal Farm first published in Great Britain by Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd 1945
Published in Penguin Books 1951
Copyright 1945 by Eric Blair
Burmese Days first published in Great Britain by Victor Gollancz 1935
Published in Penguin Books 1944
This edition published by Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd 1949
Published in Penguin Books 1967
Copyright 1934 by Eric Blair
A Clergyman’s Daughter first published in Great Britain by Victor Gollancz 1935
Published by Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd 1960
Published in Penguin Books 1964
Copyright 1935 by Eric Blair
Coming up for Air first published in Great Britain by Victor Gollancz 1939
Published by Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd 1954
Published in Penguin Books 1962
Copyright 1939 by Eric Blair
Keep the Aspidistra Flying first published in Great Britain by Victor Gollancz 1936
Published by Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd 1954
Published in Penguin Books 1962
Copyright 1936 by Eric Blair
Nineteen Eighty-four first published in Great Britain by Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd 1949
Published in Penguin Books 1954
Copyright 1949 by Eric Blair
This edition first published by Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd in association with Octopus Books Ltd 1976
Published in Penguin Books 1983
Reprinted in Penguin Classics 2000
14
Copyright © The Estate of Eric Blair, 1976, 1983
All rights reserved
Readers should note that the authoritative texts of these and other works by Orwell, as published in
Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd’s Complete Works of George Orwell series, are available in
single-volume editions in Penguin
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject
to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,
re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s
prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in
which it is published and without a similar condition including this
condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
ISBN: 9780141911656
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
The novels of George Orwell, like his great essays, reflect, as in a mirror, constantly crystal-clear and frequently sharp with menace, the extensive changes of outlook and the shifts of values in British and indeed much of human society in the first half of the twentieth century.
Orwell was born Eric Blair in 1903 in an India that still seemed firmly fixed in an immutable Empire on which the sun never set. He attended Eton, his first publication was a patriotic poem printed by a provincial newspaper during the 1914–18 war, and in 1922 he joined the Indian Imperial Police and served in Burma for the next five years. On leave to England in 1927 he decided not to return to the Far East and resigned. From that time his life, until then seemingly cast in an upper middle-class mould and pointing towards a conventional career in Imperial service, took an entirely fresh course. Determined to become a writer, he lived in a succession of mean rooms on next to nothing in London and Paris, and it was in the latter city that his first article as a professional writer was published. He worked there as a kitchen porter in a luxury hotel and tramped and picked hops in Kent, later both conjured up so vividly in Down and Out in Paris and London. During this time, 1930–33, Orwell picked up a meagre living as well as he could, whether by reviewing or teaching, and he continued to write Burmese Days, completing it before going down with a bout of recurrent pneumonia. When the book came out in the U.S.A. (as no English publisher had bought it) Orwell had taken a job as a part-time assistant in a London bookshop. Burmese Days eventually appeared in England, a few months after A Clergyman’s Daughter came out in 1935. Early in the following year Orwell was reviewing fiction for the New English Weekly and was also gathering material for a book on the depressed areas of the industrial North of England, The Road to Wigan Pier.
When the Spanish Civil War began in 1936, Orwell foresaw the importance of its outcome to the future of Europe and before the year ended he had enlisted in Barcelona. While in the front line as a Republican militiaman with the P.O.U.M., the anarchists and the Trotskyites, he was shot in the throat by a sniper. He survived and returned to England to write one of the most forthright and fearless books on the Spanish struggle, Homage to Catalonia, which came out in April 1938, one of the first books to denounce the Communists for exploiting the struggle for their own ends. He was repeatedly rejected on medical grounds when he tried to enlist in the British Army in 1939 on the outbreak of war. He subsequently served in the Home Guard, worked in the B.B.C. and became Literary Editor of Tribune.
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