Our Job Is To Make Life Worth Living

In 'Reflections on Gandhi', published in January 1949, in which he modified the strictures made in a previous review, Orwell wrote, 'our job is to make life worth living on this earth, which is the only earth we have'. While a patient at the Cotswold Sanatorium, Cranham, he read the proofs of Nineteen Eighty-Four and wrote five reviews. He bagan, but did not finish, an article on Evelyn Waugh, made notes for an essay on Conrad, and sketched out a long short-story, 'A Smoking-Room Story'. The volume includes many unpublished letters, Warburg's report on his visit to Cranham, a clarification of Orwell's public statement on Nineteen Eighty-Four, and a detailed examination, with all the relevant correspondence, of Orwell's relationship with the Information Research Department of the Foreign Office. Two of the last items are a cheerful letter from Nancy Parratt, one of his BBC secretaries, and a letter from Sonia Orwell (whom Orwell had married a few weeks after he was transferred to University College Hospital, London). This volume concludes with a series of appendices.