"A fresh take on George Orwell as a far more nature-loving figure than is often portrayed, and a dazzlingly rich meditation on roses, gardens, and the value and use of beauty and pleasure in the face of brutality and horror. "In the spring of 1936 a man planted roses." That man was George Orwell, shortly before he went off to fight against fascism in Spain. Today, those rosebushes are still thriving. This is the starting point for Rebecca Solnit's new book, which presents another side of Orwell, a neglected arcadian Orwell who took enormous pleasure in the natural world and found great meaning and value in it. Orwell's planting of the roses is an axle from which Solnit's chapters radiate out like spokes as she brilliantly explores its various contexts, perspectives, and meanings, following the contours of Orwell's life and tracking how deeply enmeshed the love of nature is in all his writing. Journeying to the cottage in Wallingford where Orwell lived in 1936, she examines his desire to be agrarian and settled, how gardening restored him, and how planting something can be an act of fidelity and faith. Probing at the beauty and meaning of roses, she draws in the revolutionary photography and politics of Tina Modotti and makes a clandestine visit to a Columbian rose factory, where 80% of America's roses for sale are grown. She tracks the history of gardening, showing how the desire to garden is culturally determined and often rooted in class, recounts the immense battles over breeding and genetics in Russia during Stalin's time, and probes into the colonialist roots of Orwell's forebears, who worked in opium production in India and profiteered from sugar and slavery in Jamaica. Solnit shows how these points of intersection illuminate Orwell's work, and how that illumination shines forth on larger questions about beauty, pleasure, meaning, relationship, and hope. Her book establishes that "Orwellian" could stand for something more than ominous, corrupt, and sinister"--

George Orwell was one of the most significant literary figures on the left in the twentieth century. While books such as Nineteen Eighty-Four, Animal Farm, and Homage to Catalonia are regarded as modern classics, his own politics are less well understood. The author offers a sympathetic yet critical account of Orwell's political thinking and its continued significance. The book details Orwell's attempts to change working-class consciousness, and considers if his attitude towards the working class was romantic, realistic, or patronizing--or all three at different times. The author asks whether Orwell's anti-fascism was eclipsed by his criticism of the Soviet Union, and explores his ambivalent relationship with the Labour Party. The book also examines Orwell's changing views on the Second World War--from opposition to Britain entering the war to his later condemnations of pacifism. Focusing on the enduring interest in Orwell today, this is a unique, nuanced account which demonstrates that Orwell remained a committed socialist up until his death.

One hundred years after the publication of Looking Backward, Bellamy remains a controversial figure in American literary and social history. The collection of essays in this volume, commemorating the novel's appearance in 1888, attests to his continued importance.

Orwell's politics is a study of George Orwell's political ideas and beliefs from his time as a policeman in Burma through to the publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four. It places Orwell's politics in historical context, examining his response to Imperialism, to mass unemployment in the 1930s, to revolution in Spain and to the Second World War and its aftermath. The book considers Orwell's belief that socialist revolution was the only road to victory in wartime Britain. It discusses his time at the BBC and at the leftwing Labour newspaper Tribune. Particular attention is paid to Orwell's American connection, to his writings for Partisan Review and for Politics. Orwell's belief that Russia had nothing in common with socialism is discussed and new sources for Nineteen Eighty-Four are identified. The book also discusses recent feminist critiques of Orwell's politics. Newsinger demonstrates that, while Orwell's political beliefs inevitably changed over the years, he remained a committed socialist up to the time of his death. Orwell's anti-Stalinism was a consequence of his socialism rather than a repudiation of it.