It was a Roman Catholic convent run by French Ursuline nuns. Aged five, Eric was sent as a day-boy to a convent school in Henley-on-Thames, which Marjorie also attended. Eric was brought up in the company of his mother and sisters and, apart from a brief visit in mid-1907, he did not see his father until 1912. In 1904, Ida Blair settled with her children at Henley-on-Thames in Oxfordshire. īlair family home at Shiplake, Oxfordshire In 2014 restoration work began on Orwell's birthplace and ancestral house in Motihari. When Eric was one year old, his mother took him and Marjorie to England. Eric had two sisters: Marjorie, five years older and Avril, five years younger. His mother, Ida Mabel Blair ( née Limouzin), grew up in Moulmein, Burma, where her French father was involved in speculative ventures. His grandfather, Thomas Richard Arthur Blair, was an Anglican clergyman, and Orwell's father was Richard Walmesley Blair, who worked as a Sub-Deputy Opium Agent in the Opium Department of the Indian Civil Service, overseeing the production and storage of opium for sale to China. His great-grandfather, Charles Blair, was a wealthy country gentleman and absentee owner of Jamaican plantations from Dorset who married Lady Mary Fane, daughter of the 8th Earl of Westmorland. Orwell's birthplace in Motihari, Bihar, India.Įric Arthur Blair was born on 25 June 1903 in Motihari, Bengal, British India into what he described as a " lower-upper-middle class" family.
In 2008, The Times ranked George Orwell second among "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945". Orwell's work remains influential in popular culture and in political culture, and the adjective " Orwellian"-describing totalitarian and authoritarian social practices-is part of the English language, like many of his neologisms, such as " Big Brother", " Thought Police", " Room 101", " Newspeak", " memory hole", " doublethink", and " thoughtcrime". It was published in June 1949, less than a year before his death. During the final years of his life he worked on Nineteen Eighty-Four, and moved between Jura in Scotland and London. The publication of Animal Farm led to fame during his life-time. During the Second World War he worked as a journalist and for the BBC.
He was wounded fighting in the Spanish Civil War, leading to his first period of ill health on return to England. From the late 1920s to the early 1930s, his success as a writer grew and his first books were published. He lived from occasional pieces of journalism, and also worked as a teacher or bookseller whilst living in London.
After school he became an Imperial policeman in Burma, before returning to Suffolk, England, where he began his writing career as George Orwell-a name inspired by a favourite location, the River Orwell. His non-fiction works, including The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), documenting his experience of working-class life in the industrial north of England, and Homage to Catalonia (1938), an account of his experiences soldiering for the Republican faction of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), are as critically respected as his essays on politics and literature, language and culture.īlair was born in India, and raised and educated in England. He is known for the allegorical novella Animal Farm (1945) and the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). Orwell produced literary criticism and poetry, fiction and polemical journalism.
His work is characterised by lucid prose, social criticism, opposition to totalitarianism, and support of democratic socialism. Anti-fascism, anti-Stalinism, anarchism, democratic socialism, literary criticism, journalism, and polemicĮric Arthur Blair (25 June 1903 – 21 January 1950), known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English novelist, essayist, journalist and critic.
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