Orwell: The New Life

by D. J. Taylor

Overview

A fascinating exploration of George Orwell—and his body of work—by an award-winning Orwellian biographer and scholar, presenting the author anew to twenty-first-century readers.

We find ourselves in an era when the moment is ripe for a reevaluation of the life and the works of one of the twentieth century’s greatest authors. This is the first twenty-first-century biography on George Orwell, with special recognition to D. J. Taylor's stature as an award-winning biographer and Orwellian.

Using new sources that are now available for the first time, we are tantalizingly at the end of the lifespan of Orwell's last few contemporaries, whose final reflections are caught in this book. The way we look at a writer and his canon has changed even over the course of the last two decades; there is a post-millennial prism through which we must now look for such a biography to be fresh and relevant. This is what Orwell: The New Life achieves.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781639364510
Publisher:	Pegasus Books
Publication date:	05/23/2023
Pages:	608
Sales rank:	139,199
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 2.00(d)

About the Author

D. J. Taylor is the author of The Lost Girls; Derby Day (nominated for the Booker Prize); and Orwell: The Life (2003), winner of the Whitbread Biography Award. D. J. is a book critic for several British newspapers and lives in London.

Editorial Reviews

★ 03/13/2023

Novelist and book critic Taylor (On 1984) delivers a sterling account of the life and works of George Orwell (1903–1950). Born Eric Blair in Motihari, India, Orwell moved with his family to Oxfordshire, England, while he was an infant. Following his schooling, he worked as a policeman in Burma before returning to England, where he began his career as a writer and adapted his pseudonym from Suffolk’s River Orwell. Taylor digs into the creation of Orwell’s most celebrated works, noting the acclaim that followed the 1945 publication of his Stalinism allegory, Animal Farm, despite having been rejected by multiple publishers because of the novel’s criticism of the Soviet Union while the country was fighting alongside the U.K. in WWII. Orwell furthered his critique of totalitarianism in Nineteen Eighty-Four, which he wrote while battling tuberculosis. He died from the disease at age 46, a year after the novel’s publication. Taylor doesn’t elide the less savory aspects of the author’s character, noting that Orwell’s “dislike of homosexuals follows him through his work like the clang of a medieval leper bell,” and the meticulous research illuminates how Orwell’s political commitments informed his fiction. This stands out in the crowded field of Orwell biographies. (May)

Publishers Weekly

Praise for The Lost Girls:

From the Publisher

Because of D. J. Taylor’s vivid and affecting group biography, the 'lost girls' will never be lost again."

The Washington Post

Taylor makes use of Orwell’s own intellectual tools: his exposure of doublethink and of the magic tricks of oppression, his championing of those who suffer, and his commitment to clear thought. Taylor deploys all this to throw light on the people Orwell failed to notice or fully understand — including, perhaps, himself.

Sarah Bakewell

Highly entertaining account of the volatile lives of four young women.

The Wall Street Journal

"Mr. Taylor’s Orwell: The New Life is a new text that completes the picture by fleshing out Orwell’s emotional life with recently discovered letters and interviews with the last living people to have known him. Expertly told and subtle in judgment, The New Life will not be the last word in the ever-growing field of Orwelliana, but it will become its central monument.

Dominic Green

Taylor expertly illuminates how early influences provided Orwell with a keen interest in the power of language and the language of power. The subtitle of Taylor’s authoritative account reflects newly available material but could just as accurately reflect the renewed life given to Orwell in our post-fact world.

Booklist (starred review)

A lively, perceptive, and gossip-strewn inquiry into an overlooked aspect of an influential corner of literary life. Lost Girls features war, snobbery, high culture (and low), exotic locations, and a fast and often bizarre dramatis personae that, when its members stray, tend to do so in the most intriguing ways.

The New Criterion

Taylor gives his subjects dimension, sympathy, and credit for their contributions to letters. This book opens a window onto a fascinating literary and social period and will inspire readers to explore it further in both history and fiction.

Booklist

"A triumphant success."

Financial Times

Taylor gives his subjects dimension, sympathy, and credit for their contributions to letters. This book opens a window onto a fascinating literary and social period and will inspire readers to explore it further in both history and fiction.

Booklist

"A triumphant success."

Financial Times

05/01/2023

In 2003, Taylor's biography of George Orwell (Orwell: The Life) was published to critical acclaim. Twenty years later, he has mined newly available material on Orwell to thoroughly update that earlier work. In 2012 and 2013, Orwell's diaries and letters were published, and Taylor uses those primary documents liberally. He also taps into new material by and about some of Orwell's contemporaries. There's a detailed account of Orwell's wedding to Sonia Brownell at the University College Hospital in London on October 13, 1949; Orwell was bedridden with tuberculosis and died 100 days later. Their wedding was only briefly mentioned near the end of Taylor's previous book. In this latest biography, there is a section called "Orwell and His World," which discusses Orwell's personal characteristics, ill health, and friendships, also drawing from new material. Missing, however, from this new version is the short appendix "Orwell and His Publisher," but Taylor writes meticulous notes on his sources, which include all of the significant works written about Orwell since 2003. This book ranks as the new definitive work on Orwell. VERDICT A useful introduction for readers new to Orwell and also illuminating for those who thought they knew everything about him.—Thomas Karel

Library Journal