I’ve just finished Hilary Spurling’s
The Girl from the Fiction Department, a short life of Sonia Orwell, a woman who I essentially knew nothing about but everything I did know anything about hitherto was essentially negative. I can’t recall where these ideas came from but I do know that if I read anything at all about her it suggested that she was in some way a money-fixated fool who tricked George Orwell into marrying her in the last months of his life, which suited him because he would then have someone to look after his son. Spurling doesn’t really make it clear how in her view Sonia Orwell’s critics got to control this narrative, or indeed what exactly was in it for them, although I suppose haters don’t need to justify their hating, do they. Spurling depicts an extremely different person, a woman she only knew late in her (SO’s) life, but who was highly intelligent and extremely involved in at least two social circles (in London and Paris) where she rubbed shoulders as an equal with famous and interesting people of whom Francis Bacon and Iris Murdoch are merely two names that spring to mind (I’ve put the book in my bag to return it to the library).
There is a horrible event described early in the book whereby three of Sonia’s friends drown before her eyes in a Swiss lake. I don’t know how anyone could really survive, mentally, an event like that. She had plenty more horrors to live through, as well, particularly living and working in central London during WW2. In some ways the hardest part of the book was the ending; the last years of SO’s life were dealing with the fact that she had been squeezed out of control of the Orwell estate by an unscrupulous accountant who she had trusted.
Arguably hilariously if you go searching for pictures of Sonia Orwell on google images you get a lot of pictures of Cressida Bonas, an actor who once had a relationship with one of the english Princes, I forget/don't care which one, and who played SO in a 2017 play called Mrs Orwell.
This is a picture of the actual Sonia Orwell nee Brownell, for what it's worth, a few years before she married GO. Clearly her marriage to GO (it lasted a couple of months, then he died) was just one of a thousand interesting things she did, but of course it came to define her, which was a shame. Spurling mentions SO mapped out a semi-autobiographical novel which would have been pretty fascinating I suspect but she didn't complete it.
