Sonia Mary Orwell (née Brownell, 25 August 1918 – 11 December 1980) was a British editor and archivist. She was the second wife of Eric Arthur Blair, commonly known by his pen name George Orwell. Born in British India, Brownell's family moved to London, where she was educated at Sacred Heart Convent in Roehampton. In her twenties, she became involved with the founders of the Euston Road School, as model for William Coldstream, Victor Pasmore and Claude Rogers.

She met Orwell while working at the literary magazine, Horizon. After the death of his wife, Eileen Blair, when Orwell was dying from tuberculosis, they married in hospital on 13 October 1949. Their marriage lasted for three months until his death. As his sole heir and literary executor, Brownell was protective of his estate for years after his death. She established the George Orwell Archive at University College London in 1960. With Ian Angus, she edited The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell in 1968. Brownell is believed to be the model for Julia, the heroine of Nineteen Eighty-Four.

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). Her father died in a suspected suicide when she was four months old. Her older sister, Beatrice (known as Bay) was deeply affected by the loss at the age of four. Following his burial in Calcutta, the family sailed back to England to be with their relations. On 5 January 1920, her mother married Edgar Geoffrey Dixon (1880–1953), a chartered accountant. The family returned to Calcutta, where they lived at 1 Old Ballygunge Road, Mayfair. A younger half brother, Michael, was born in 1921.

Brownell was raised as a Roman Catholic and at the age of six was sent to boarding school from 1 September 1924 at the Sacred Heart Convent in Roehampton, London Afterwards she blamed herself for his death, telling her half-brother, Michael, that she had held him under the water. She moved into a flat in Fitzrovia, London, where she socialised with Caitlin Macnamara and Vivien John. In the summer of 1938, she travelled around Eastern Europe with her new friends, Serge Konovalov, who would become professor of Russian at the University of Oxford, and Eugène Vinaver. Her London flat was located in an artists' neighbourhood, so her long blonde hair was quickly noticed by the local artists like Lawrence Gowing. By the late 1930s, she had renounced being a Roman Catholic. She worked as a secretary for John Lehmann in 1941 and at the Ministry of War Transport. In 1945, she returned to Horizon as an editorial secretary and acted as working partner for Connolly in his absence. When she met Orwell again, he was dying from tuberculosis and she made visits to him in hospital. He proposed marriage to her again and this time she accepted.

On the night that Orwell died, Brownell had left the hospital and received the news of his death by telephone. Michael Shelden and Jeffrey Meyers, two American biographers, claimed that she was "nightclubbing in Soho" at the time with her former lover Lucian Freud. Spurling discredited this, stating that she spent the evening with Freud and his lover Anne Dunne, who had persuaded her to go to a bar in Percy Street where Brownell lived. There she had been discussing with Freud and Dunne the prospect of moving Orwell to a Swiss sanatorium. After Brownell learned the news of his death, Natasha Spender said that she was inconsolable for several weeks. Spender commented: "When he died, it was cataclysmic. She had persuaded herself she loved him intellectually, for his writings, but she found she really loved him." Their marriage shocked Orwell's friends. David Astor commented, "Orwell was totally unfit to marry anyone. He was scarcely alive". Malcolm Muggeridge described the marriage as "slightly macabre and incomprehensible". Ian Angus said that Brownell's marriage to Orwell "had to do with her own deep unhappiness". She had been devastated by her relationship with Merleau-Ponty, whom she described as her true love. Several years later she confided to Spurling, "He said he would get better if I married him, so you see I had no choice". This deal resulted in the creation of the propaganda film Animal Farm (1954), which became the first feature-length animated film made in Britain.

Orwell requested in his will that no biography should be written of his life and Brownell spent years trying to enforce his wishes, causing tension with prospective biographers. Various accounts were published by the end of the 1950s, including works by Laurence Brander and John Atkins. She appointed Malcolm Muggeridge as official biographer, but he did not complete a finished work. She later appointed Bernard Crick as biographer, who produced George Orwell: A Biography in late 1980.

Together with David Astor and Richard Rees, she established the George Orwell Archive at University College London in 1960. In 1968, she edited, with Angus, The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell.

Brownell 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, and for British embassies to disseminate the book in over 14 countries for propaganda purposes.

Marriage to Michael Pitt-Rivers

Brownell married Michael Pitt-Rivers in 1958. Her marriage to Pitt-Rivers ended in divorce in 1965. Afterwards, Pitt-Rivers bought her a house in South Kensington. Her friend, the painter Francis Bacon, paid her debts. She was buried on 18 December 1980 at Putney Vale Cemetery. 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. Orwell biographer Bernard Crick disagreed, telling The Washington Post he did not think that Brownell "had much influence on his life" and commented that "it was more or less an accident that they married." Another biographer, D. J. Taylor, acknowledged some similarities between Brownell and Julia, but held the opinion that Julia was instead a composite of several women in Orwell's life.

In 2017, Brownell was portrayed by Cressida Bonas opposite Peter Hamilton Dyer as Orwell in a play titled Mrs Orwell at the Old Red Lion Theatre, London. It then transferred to the Southwark Playhouse.

References

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Further reading

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