Sonia Orwell

Sonia Mary Orwell (née Brownell, 25 August 1918 – 11 December 1980), was the second wife of writer George Orwell. Sonia is believed to be the model for Julia, the heroine of Nineteen Eighty-Four.<ref name=":0">Template:Cite web</ref><ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Sonia worked with the Information Research Department (IRD), a propaganda department of the British Foreign Office, which helped to increase the international fame of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. With her support, the IRD was able to translate Animal Farm into over 16 languages,<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> and for British embassies to disseminate the book in over 14 countries for propaganda purposes.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> Soon after her husband's death, Sonia sold the film rights to Animal Farm to a pair of movie executives, unaware they were agents of the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). This deal resulted in the creation of the propaganda film Animal Farm (1954), which became the first feature-length animated film made in Britain.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>

Early life

Brownell was born on 25 August 1918 at Mesra Thaua, in Ranchi, British India, the daughter of Charles Neville Brownell (1882–1918), a Calcutta freight broker, and Beatrice Edith Binning (1890–1959).<ref name=":3">Template:Cite ODNB</ref> Her father died in a suspected suicide when she was four months old.<ref name=":2">Template:Cite web</ref> On 5 January 1920 her mother married Edgar Geoffrey Dixon (1880–1953), a chartered accountant, who was an alcoholic. His drinking ruined his career in Calcutta and when the family returned to England in 1927, the marriage broke up. Brownell had a sister named Bay and a younger half-brother named Michael.<ref name=":3" /> Her mother earned money by managing boarding houses. Brownell was raised as a Roman Catholic and sent from 1927 to 1935 to boarding school at the Sacred Heart Convent in Roehampton, London (now part of Roehampton University), which she despised.<ref name=":0" /><ref name=":3" /> She hated the nuns that ran the school, felt deeply lonely, and was held in contempt by other students.<ref name=":2" />

At the age of 17, Brownell was involved in a tragic accident, while staying with a family in Neuchâtel, Switzerland. She had gone sailing with three acquaintances when the boat overturned. The other young people were unable to swim. Brownell attempted to save a boy, but he struggled and pulled her down with him, so that she was unable to save him. Afterwards she blamed herself for his death, telling her half-brother, Michael, that she had held him under the water.<ref name="lrb.co.uk" /> In the summer of 1936, she returned to London, due to being affected by the tragedy.<ref name=":3" />

After learning French in Switzerland, she took a secretarial course.<ref name="theguardian.com">Template:Cite web</ref> In the 1930s, she travelled around Eastern Europe with Serge Konovalov, who would become professor of Russian at the University of Oxford, and Eugène Vinaver.<ref name=":1" /> In 1938, Brownell was responsible for transcribing and editing the copy text for the first edition of the Winchester Le Morte d'Arthur, as assistant to Vinaver, a medievalist at Manchester University.<ref name=":1">Template:Cite news</ref> Her London flat was located in an artists' neighbourhood, so her long blonde hair was quickly noticed by the local artists like Lawrence Gowing.<ref name=":1" /> She became the model for the painters of the Euston Road School, including William Coldstream and Victor Pasmore and became friends with artists such as Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud.<ref name=":0" /> By the late 1930s, she had renounced being a Roman Catholic.<ref name=":3" />

Marriage to George Orwell

Brownell first met George Orwell when she worked as the assistant to Cyril Connolly, a friend of his from Eton College, at the literary magazine Horizon. After the death of his first wife Eileen Blair, Orwell became desperately lonely. On 13 October 1949, he married Brownell, only three months before his death from tuberculosis.Template:Sfnp

Orwell's friends and biographers have noted that Brownell helped him through the painful last months of his life and, according to Anthony Powell, cheered him up greatly. Others have argued that she may have been attracted to him primarily because of his fame.<ref name="lrb.co.uk">Template:Cite journal</ref> Brownell's biographer and friend, Hilary Spurling, wrote that Brownell was stricken with grief at Orwell's death. Natasha Spender, stated: "When he died, it was cataclysmic. She had persuaded herself she loved him intellectually, for his writings, but she found she really loved him."<ref name="Carroll" />

Archivist

Together with David Astor and Richard Rees, Orwell's literary executor, Brownell established the George Orwell Archive at University College London, which opened in 1960.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> Brownell was fiercely protective<ref name="lrb.co.uk"/> of Orwell's estate and edited, with Ian Angus, The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell (4 volumes, Secker & Warburg, London, 1968).

Later relationships

Brownell married Michael Pitt-Rivers in 1958,<ref name="lrb.co.uk"/> and had affairs with several British painters, including Lucian Freud, William Coldstream and Victor Pasmore. Her marriage to Pitt-Rivers ended in divorce in 1965. She also had an affair with the French phenomenological philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, whom she described as her true love;Template:Sfnp she hoped he would leave his wife for her. Brownell had several godchildren and was very close to some of them. Her godson Tom Gross has written in The Spectator magazine that "although Sonia had no children of her own, she became almost like a second mother to me."Template:Sfnp Sonia was also close friends with many writers and artists, including Pablo Picasso, who drew a sketch in her honour, which he marked "Sonia."Template:Sfnp

Legal battle

Brownell launched a High Court legal case in 1979 against Jack Harrison, who was a senior partner at an accountancy firm. Orwell had contacted Harrison's firm and was advised to set up a company in order to receive the royalties from his work and own the copyright. George Orwell Productions Ltd (GOP Ltd) was established on 12 September 1947. In September 1949, Harrison took control of the company by claiming that Orwell had asked him at his hospital bed to take the position of director. Although Brownell was named as one of the company directors, Harrison executed a service agreement, which passed ownership of the copyright to the company. Harrison also claimed, in the absence of witnesses, that Orwell had offered him 25% of the shares in GOP. Due to her grief, Brownell had left Harrison in charge of managing GOP. In 1958, Harrison transferred 75% of the stock to himself. In 1977, he told Brownell that all of the income from Orwell's works had been absorbed in tax and advised her to move to Paris. When Brownell's lawyers demanded to see the business accounts, it revealed that GOP had lost £100,000 in stock market investments. In 1979, she took Harrison and GOP to the High Court, but in the spring of 1980, she moved to Spurling's flat in London in poor health. Eventually the case was settled out of court on 24 November 1980. Brownell paid Harrison to retrieve the literary rights to Orwell's work. Spurling commented that, "he deprived her of what she had to get back what she should have had".<ref name="Carroll" />

Death

Brownell died penniless in London of a brain tumour on 11 December 1980, having spent a fortune trying to protect Orwell's name and having been swindled out of her remaining funds by Harrison. She left the rights to Orwell's work to his son, Richard Blair.<ref name=Carroll>Template:Cite news</ref> Her friend, the painter Francis Bacon, paid her debts. At her funeral, Tom Gross read the same passage from Ecclesiastes, chapter 12 verses 1–7 about the breaking of the golden bowl, that she had asked Anthony Powell to read at Orwell's funeral thirty years earlier.Template:Sfnp

Influence on Orwell's work

T. R. Fyvel, who was a colleague and friend of George Orwell during the last decade of the writer's life, and other friends of Orwell, have said that Sonia was the model for Julia, the heroine of Nineteen Eighty-Four, the "girl from the fiction department" who brings love and warmth to the middle-aged hero, Winston Smith.<ref>Template:Cite book.</ref> Orwell biographer Bernard Crick told The Washington Post he did not think that Brownell "had much influence on his life" and asserted that "it was more or less an accident that they married."<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>

References

Notes

Bibliography

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Further reading

• Sylvia Topp: Eileen : the making of George Orwell, London : Unbound, 2020, Template:ISBN