George Orwell was born Eric Arthur Blair on 25 June 1903 in Motihari, Bengal, British India. He was an English novelist, essayist, journalist and critic most famous for his novels Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-four (1949). His work is characterised by lucid prose, social criticism, opposition to totalitarianism, and support of democratic socialism.
Orwell’s father, Richard Walmesley Blair, was an Opium Agent in the Indian Civil Service and his mother was the daughter of an unsuccessful French teak merchant in Burma. Their attitudes were those of the “landless gentry,” as Orwell later called lower-middle-class people whose pretensions to social status bore little relation to their income. The family of five lived in impoverished snobbery. In 1911, after returning with his parents to England, Orwell was sent to boarding school for five years. He hated the school and grew up as a withdrawn and eccentric boy, later telling of the miseries of those years in his posthumously published autobiographical essay, Such, Such Were the Joys (1953). After finishing school he joined the Indian Imperial Police in Burma in 1922 but resigned in 1927 to become a writer, although his lack of success forced him into a series of paid jobs.
By 1943, he was a prolific journalist, writing articles, reviews and books, and he was swamped with work. Animal Farm was published in 1945. It is a political fable set in a farmyard but based on Stalin’s betrayal of the Russian Revolution, it made Orwell’s name and ensured he was financially comfortable for the first time in his life. Four years later, in June 1949, Nineteen Eighty-Four was published to critical acclaim. This dystopian social science fiction novel and cautionary tale has been described as the definitive novel of the 20th century.
Orwell always liked women and had many girlfriends. In June 1936 he married Eileen O’Shaughnessy. After trying to have children they learned that he was unable to and in June 1944 adopted a three-week-old boy they named Richard Horatio. Eileen died in March 1945 when she was thirty-nine. Orwell was lonely after Eileen’s death and, desperate for a wife, both as a companion for himself and as a mother for Richard, he proposed marriage to four women. His health began to decline and he received a diagnosis of tuberculosis in December 1947. In mid-1949, he met Sonia Brownell, they became engaged in September, and the wedding took place in the hospital the following month, October. Sonia took charge of Orwell’s affairs and attended him diligently in the hospital.
George Orwell died of tuberculosis on 21 January 1950 aged just 46.