“In a world where authoritarianism, nationalism, xenophobia and political lying are all on the rise, we need Animal Farm by our side more than ever,” wrote Orwell’s son, Richard Blair, in the Guardian this weekend.
In the last decade or so – amid Trump, Putin, Netanyahu, Xi, Modi, Orbán, Erdoğan, et al – the English writer has become a cultural touchstone, with “Orwellian” the favourite adjective of columnists responding to real-life political events that seem to spring from the playbook of Nineteen Eighty-Four, that later rendering of an authoritarian state ruled by Big Brother and the Party.
Orwell’s works are the “natural antithesis to fascism and all facile populisms that tend in that direction”, says Sandra Newman, who wrote Julia, a retelling of Nineteen Eighty-Four from the perspective of Winston Smith’s eponymous lover, at the request of Orwell’s estate.
In recent years, we have seen a flurry of new material about the author: along with such reimaginings of his books there have been re-evaluations of the contributions of his first wife Eileen, and his professional output. So who is Orwell in 2025?
His work has lasted because he is both “eternally optimistic” and “brutally realistic”, says Newman. Animal Farm is a “great example” of this blend. “You finish it not with a feeling of futility, but with a sense of the need for smarter revolutions and a healthy fear of the unthinking kind.”
The great thing about Animal Farm is “how much we continue to find out about it,” says DJ Taylor, the author of Orwell: The Life, published 2003, and Orwell: The New Life, 20 years later. “The circumstances of its composition, and the possible involvement of his first wife, Eileen, to the attempts made to suppress its publication by Soviet spies and the idea that, as well as satirising the Russian Revolution, Orwell is revisiting his childhood in rural Oxfordshire.”
Blair describes Animal Farm being a result of his “parents’ teamwork”, with Eileen “perhaps even suggesting it should be a ‘beast fable’” rather than the political polemic originally planned.
Eileen “knew and loved the animal fable form”, and had studied under JRR Tolkien at Oxford, says Anna Funder, author of the 2023 book on Eileen, Wifedom. She had also worked in the censorship department at the UK’s ministry of information, so was acutely aware that, given Stalin was a UK ally against Hitler, Orwell’s original idea of a barefaced critique of Stalinism and totalitarianism would never be published, and steered him away from it.
Reading Eileen’s letters, “with their acute and hilarious character sketches, her deep insight into people, her irony and whimsy, you recognise her voice on every page of Animal Farm”, Funder adds. “Her psychological depth and sympathy met his political insights and made a masterpiece.”
The couple worked on the book from bed, under heavy blankets to stay warm during the winter of 1943 to 44, at the height of the second world war.
“Nothing is taken away from Animal Farm by knowing how much Eileen influenced it,” says Funder. “In fact, it makes it a richer experience.”
Photograph: /Ullstein Bild/Getty Images
