FEW WRITERS have achieved the cult status of George Orwell. He is so much a part of the collective imagination that John Rodden, an Orwell scholar, goes so far as to call him “the most important ...

George Orwell was a “sadistic, misogynistic, homophobic, sometimes violent” man who wrote women out of his story, according to a biographer of his wife. Anna Funder said that Orwell was a ...

Patriarchy is a giant Ponzi scheme, and writer George Orwell was in the middle of it, Anna Funder says in a biography of the author’s neglected wife, Eileen. Andrew Clark Senior writer Aug 23 ...

DJ Taylor published Orwell: The Lifein 2003. Now he offers a new biography that draws upon new materials that have surfaced since (Orwell’s letters to women he was infatuated with, for instance).

Let’s start with Taylor. He traces the usual biographical arc, from Orwell’s birth in Bengal in 1903 to his death from tuberculosis in 1950, via boarding-school sufferings, a spell in the ...

WIFEDOM: Mrs. Orwell’s Invisible Life. By Anna Funder. Knopf. 464 pages. $32. Throughout my reading life, I have returned to George Orwell’s work for the pleasure and power of his words and ...