Orwells

George Orwell’s first novel, Burmese Days, published in 1934, drew substantially on the five years he served in the Indian imperial police force at various stations along the Irrawaddy a decade earlier. You suspect, however, that his alter ego in that novel, John Flory, was a good deal more seasoned than the young writer, still called Eric Blair, had been when he arrived in Mandalay in 1922. Flory was cast as a teak merchant in his mid-30s; Blair was unvarnished and 19 and just out of Eton. Similarly, Orwell’s two…

Despite his death in 1950, George Orwell has become the latest author to join Substack, following in the footsteps of Salman Rushdie and George Saunders.The Orwell Foundation is set to launch Orwell Daily, which will serialise Orwell’s work via the email subscription platform.Orwell Daily will begin on 28 October with the writer’s memoir Down and Out in Paris and London. Published in 1933, this was Orwell’s first published full-length work. It begins in Paris, where Orwell worked as a dishwasher at Hotel X, and then moves…