LYCOS RETRIEVER 
George Orwell: Nineteen Eighty-Four
built 269 days ago
By now, Orwell's health was steadily deteriorating. Renewed tuberculosis early in 1947 did not prevent the composition of the first draft of his masterpiece, Nineteen Eighty-four. The second draft was written in 1948 during several attacks of the disease. By the end of 1948 Orwell was seriously ill. Nineteen Eighty-four (1949) is an elaborate satire on modern politics, prophesying a world perpetually laid waste by warring dictators.
Source:
In achieving this goal, Orwell assumed the frenetic lifestyle that claimed other tubercular writers. ``Down and out'' days, shop-keeping in a drafty cottage, trench warfare -- the pattern of neglect escalated. Orwell broadcast from London during the Blitz (the BBC canteen inspired a passage in ``Nineteen Eighty-Four''), and spent his last years on a remote Scottish isle. Meyers grimly describes his death-bed wedding to Sonia Brownell: ``a blooming Renoir beauty and a gaunt El Greco saint.''
Source:
Orwell expounded on the importance of honest and clear language (and, conversely, on how misleading and vague language can be a tool of political manipulation) in his 1946 essay Politics and the English Language. The language of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four is Newspeak: a thoroughly politicised and obfuscatory language designed to make coherent thought impossible by limiting acceptable word choices.
Source:
Women are by no means invisible in Orwell's travelogue, but they occur as wives or daughters or young persons caught in domestic drudgery. If he had known of women working in mining it seems likely that he would have been appalled; most educated people imagined that women and children had been spared such arduous work since at least the time of Lord Shaftesbury. Another feminist critic, Deirdre Beddoe, complains of the women in Orwell's novels, who are either shrews or geese, vamps or frumps, or else (Julia in Nineteen Eighty-Four excepted) grasping and conformist.
Source:
MORE ABOUT
Nineteen Eighty-Four