14 Facts About Sonia Brownell

Sonia Mary Brownell, better known as Sonia Orwell, was the second wife of writer George Orwell.

Sonia Brownell collaborated with the Information Research Department, a propaganda department of the British Foreign Office, which helped to increase the international fame of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Sonia Brownell was born in Calcutta, British India, the daughter of a British colonial official.

Sonia Brownell left at 17 and, after learning French in Switzerland, took a secretarial course.

Sonia Brownell first met Orwell when she worked as the assistant to Cyril Connolly, a friend of his from Eton College, at the literary magazine Horizon.

Related searches

George Orwell's friends, as well as various Orwell experts, have noted that Sonia Brownell helped Orwell through the painful last months of his life and, according to Anthony Powell, cheered Orwell up greatly.

Sonia Brownell was very young, he thought, she still expected something from life.

Sonia Brownell did not understand that there was no such thing as happiness, that the only victory lay in the far future, long after you were dead.

Together with David Astor and Richard Rees, George Orwell's literary executor, Sonia Brownell established the George Orwell Archive at University College London, which opened in 1960.

Sonia Brownell was fiercely protective of Orwell's estate and edited, with Ian Angus, The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell.

Sonia Brownell married Michael Pitt-Rivers in 1958, and had affairs with several British painters, including Lucian Freud, William Coldstream and Victor Pasmore.

Sonia Brownell had an affair with the French phenomenological philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, whom she described as her true love; she hoped he would leave his wife for her.

Sonia Brownell had several godchildren and was very close to some of them.

Sonia Brownell died penniless in London of a brain tumour in December 1980, having spent a fortune trying to protect Orwell's name and having been swindled out of her remaining funds by an unscrupulous accountant.