ANOTHER REASON TO LOVE ORWELL:

The ever-longer road to Wigan Pier: Biographers often fall out of love with their subjects. But a year after publication of his life of Orwell, DJ Taylor is excited by new material about the writer and has become an obsessive relic collector (DJ Taylor, February 21, 2004, The Guardian)

Quite as fascinating is a letter sent from Orwell's sickbed in Hairmyres Hospital near Glasgow in May 1948 to a Mrs Marshall, a lady with whom he had begun to correspond during the war. Mrs Marshall was clearly solicitous of his welfare. At any rate, he begins by confessing that "It has been on my conscience for a long time that you once sent me a pot of jam for which I never thanked you."

The letter is chiefly interesting as a statement of Orwell's literary opinions: his continuing dislike of JB Priestley ("...he is awful, and it is astonishing that he has actually had a sort of comeback in reputation during the last year or two"), his admiration for Osbert Sitwell and George Gissing ("one of the best English novelists, though he has never had his due") and his attempt, while bed-bound, to read Henry James ("I can never really get to care for him").

Greater love hath no man than for those who dislike Henry James.

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 23, 2004 01:42 PM