Is George Orwell About to be Cancelled?” That headline in the Daily Mail in October 2023 reflected a prolonged and ferocious barrage of attacks on Orwell as a villainous, philandering, abusive husband who had even pilfered his wife Eileen’s idea for Animal Farm and took the title for Nineteen Eighty-Four from part of the title of a poem by her—all of this, of course, without a murmur of acknowledgment or expression of gratitude of any kind.
Orwell himself “could soon become a candidate for cancellation,” observed a Daily Telegraph contributor, since he was “a misogynist who bullied his wife,” which rendered him suitable to become another “writer from the past . . . cancelled for thoughtcrime,” ironically. Grieving that Eileen’s “brilliance” had so long gone unheralded, The Times of London deplored that Orwell “stole her ideas.” A Guardian writer got down to specifics: “Was Mrs. Orwell the real genius behind Animal Farm?” The implication was clear: yes, of course. And not just Animal Farm. As a Brisbane Times contributor wrote:
As George is piss-farting around in the hills of Catalonia, playing at being a soldier, Eileen is working in the nerve centre of the resistance. . . . It is Eileen who keeps the couple solvent. Eileen who brings home tales of censorship from her wartime job at the Ministry of Information. Eileen who first writes a dystopian work called “End of the Century, 1984.” Eileen who sharpens the satire of Animal Farm.
These paroxysms of rage in the book-review
