The biographer discusses newly discovered letters, Orwell’s self-mythologising, and the changing meaning of “Orwellian”.
D. J. Taylor is a British novelist, critic, and biographer whose work encompasses biography, criticism, and cultural history. Born in Norwich in 1960, he studied Modern History at St John’s College, Oxford. After an early career in copywriting and public relations, he turned to writing full-time, initially with ambitions of becoming a novelist before his interests increasingly drew him towards criticism and biography.
He first encountered Orwell in his early teens, when he found a copy of A Clergyman’s Daughter among his mother’s books. By fifteen, Orwell had already become the subject he most wanted to write about. Four years after publishing Thackeray (1999), he published Orwell: The Life (2003), winner of the Whitbread Prize for Biography. Two decades later, he returned to the subject with Orwell: The New Life (2023), a new, from-scratch biography drawing on newly discovered letters and other archival material. His work on Orwell also includes On Nineteen Eighty-Four (2019) and Who Is Big Brother?: A Reader’s Guide to George Orwell (2024).
Beyond Orwell, Taylor has written widely on English literary culture and society, including Bright Young People, The Prose Factory, and Lost Girls. His novels include English Settlement, winner of the Grinzane Cavour Prize, Trespass and Derby Day, both longlisted for the Booker Prize, and The Windsor Faction, which jointly won the Sidewise Award for Alternate History.
He has also written extensively for the British press, including The Spectator, The Guardian, The Independent, the Times Literary Supplement, The New Statesman, and Private Eye.
Taylor is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and has served as a trustee of the Orwell Foundation and the Orwell Archive. His forthcoming book, The King Under the Mountain: In Search of J. R. R. Tolkien, is due in November 2026.
In conversation with The Exclusivist, he discusses the newly discovered Orwell letters that informed The New Life and the continuing relevance of Nineteen Eighty-Four.
In Conversation with D. J. Taylor
The Evolution of the Archive
You wrote two biographies of Orwell twenty years apart, Orwell: The Life (2003) and, more recently, Orwell: The New Life (2023), which draws on a wealth of new evidence that came to light in the interim. Looking back, what piece of that new evidence proved most consequential, and how did it reshape your understanding of the author?
My chief source in writing Orwell: The New Life was two substantial collections of newly discovered letters, one to Eleanor Jaques, a Southwold friend from the 1930s to whom he proposed marriage but who turned him down, the second to another Southwold friend, Brenda Salkeld, with whom he underwent a similar experience. They revealed – among other things – that once Orwell got a woman into his head he could never get her out again. And so more or less the first person he writes to in 1937 after he comes back from the Spanish Civil War, and for whom he supplies a highly acute precis of what will become Homage to Catalonia (1938), is Eleanor. Similarly, he wrote an extraordinarily distressed ‘the world is falling apart’ letter to Brenda in 1940, and she visited him in hospital in the autumn of 1949 shortly before he died.
Orwell’s Self-Mythology
Orwell was not only a writer of political ideas but also the author of his own life story, carefully shaping the way experiences such as his education at Eton, his time in Burma, and his years living among the poor were understood by the public. Did the new material that emerged in recent years complicate the image he sought to present to the world?
To a certain extent the new material – not simply the Eleanor/Brenda stuff – but other things too, did cause me to refine and develop my understanding of Orwell’s pronounced self-mythologising streak. I discovered, for example, that he had a habit of unburdening himself to complete strangers in very significant ways. A magazine editor called Richard Usborne who had asked for a few simple details of his career got what amounts to an autobiographical essay. A working man with literary aspirations who asked for advice received a four-page ‘how to’ guide. It seemed to me that occasionally Orwell found it easier to say what he really wanted to say, both about himself and his craft, when he was addressing people with whom he wasn’t intimately familiar.
The Logic of Power
O’Brien is one of the most unsettling figures in Nineteen Eighty-Four: not merely an agent of the Party’s violence, but the character through whom Orwell most clearly explores power, truth, and totalitarianism. What does O’Brien reveal about Orwell’s own political thinking and his understanding of how power operates?
O’Brien is a fascinating figure. For me, the crucial moments are when Orwell describes him as resembling a priest or a schoolmaster, a powerful figure who exerts that power by wheedling, exhortation and, in the end, an apparent sympathy. There are times when you sense that Winston wants to believe him, such is the psychological pull O’Brien has over him. In the same way, the young Orwell of ‘Such, Such Were the Joys’ wants to reach an accommodation with the awful Mrs Wilkes, who tyrannises over him at his prep school. Totalitarianism is, to him, collusive as well as tyrannical.
The End of Winston Smith
Winston Smith’s defeat remains one of the most unsettling endings in modern fiction. Was Orwell’s decision to end the novel with Winston’s surrender intended as a warning about the overwhelming power of totalitarianism, or was he exploring something more complicated about human weakness, survival, and the desire for security?
I think the latter. All Orwell’s novels, even the early ones written in the 1930s, are about revolutions that fail, with characters who attempt to assert themselves but end up largely returned to the situation they began in. Nineteen Eighty-Four’s plot is, essentially, that of A Clergyman’s Daughter (1935), but set in a dystopia rather than a Suffolk rectory.
The Afterlife of Nineteen Eighty-Four
Terms such as “Big Brother,” “thoughtcrime,” and “Orwellian” have become part of everyday language and are now most often associated with surveillance or digital tracking. Yet many would argue that Orwell’s deepest concern was not simply technological but epistemological: not merely that people would be watched, but that they could be made to surrender their belief in objective truth. Has that distinction been lost in the way Nineteen Eighty-Four is commonly understood?
As nearly always happens in these cases, the ‘message’ of Nineteen Eighty-Four has been bastardised, reconceptualised and trivialised over time. The three chief horrors to which the adjective ‘Orwellian’ can be attached are: a) the effect on the average human being of a wall-to-wall surveillance society; b) the manipulation of the past to support the arrangements of the present; and c) tampering with language in a way that reduces the individual’s ability to think. But ‘Orwellian’ is now one of those all-purpose signifiers that gets applied to, for example, any kind of censorship or proscription, however well-merited.
Orwell in the Modern World
Many of Orwell’s warnings have acquired new resonance in the modern world. What aspect of the present day do you think would most surprise him, and why?
I think he would probably have been startled to discover that while our modern arrangements have obvious connections to Nineteen Eighty-Four, they also resemble the kind of thing Huxley foresaw (and of which Orwell was sceptical) in Brave New World – the future being a sort of technology-enabled hedonist’s heaven.
D. J. Taylor Official Website | Orwell: The New Life
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