Orwell's widow gets her due?

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THE GIRL FROM THE FICTION DEPARTMENT: A PORTRAIT OF SONIA ORWELL

By Hilary Spurling

Counterpoint/ Perseus Books Group, $24, 208 pages, illus.

REVIEWED BY MARTIN RUBIN

"G. Orwell is dead -- and Mrs. Orwell presumably a rich widow." So wrote the vinegary Evelyn Waugh to his equally acidulous correspondent and close friend, Nancy Mitford, shortly after the author of "Animal Farm" and "1984" died in January 1950 at the age of 46.

George Orwell and Sonia Brownell had married only three months before, literally on his deathbed or at least in the room at University College Hospital in London which he was never to leave alive. There had been a brief affair the year before which was reflected in "1984" in Winston Smith's with Julia, "the girl from the fiction department" which gives this memoir its title. But there was no conjugal life or even cohabitation before Orwell died from a pulmonary arterial hemorrhage.

And so began the purgatorial three decades of widowhood in which Sonia Orwell received little or no credit for staunchly guarding and preserving her husband's oeuvre and reputation but herself acquired an unsavoury reputation for avarice and parsimony.

As her friend, the distinguished biographer Hilary Spurling, puts it at the outset of her passionate defense cum memoir, "The Girl From the Fiction Department: A Portrait of Sonia Orwell":