It was not the first time the book had struck a chord. Released into a Cold War world in 1949, it sold out almost immediately. When the author died in January the following year, he lived on as an adjective, “Orwellian” (meaning everything he warned against), and as a figure of transcendent moral authority. But can anyone, dead or not, live up to such a role? Of course not, and Orwell’s biographers have struggled to find a balance between his thoroughly impressive life’s work and his — to put it gently — oddities and weaknesses.
這本書引起共鳴並非首次。 1949年，在冷戰時期出版，幾乎立即售罄。隔年1月，作者去世，他卻以「奧威爾式的」（指他所警告的一切）的形容詞和超越道德權威的形象繼續存在。但無論生死，有人能勝任這樣的角色嗎？當然不能。奧威爾的傳記作者們一直在努力在他令人印象深刻的人生事業與——委婉地說——怪癖和弱點之間尋找平衡。
後者最糟糕的方面與他對待女性的方式有關。他有強迫性不忠的傾向，會撲向那些有時不得不與他進行肢體對抗的女性熟人，尤其是當她們與他一起在森林或荒野中時。 （對奧威爾來說，大自然充滿了情色的氣息。）然而，他似乎不太喜歡將女性視為人類。他為小說中的男性主角寫下了帶有非自願獨身主義色彩、厭女主義的咆哮。甚至他自己也承認自己對第一任妻子艾琳·奧肖納西（Eileen O’Shaughnessy）態度惡劣。所有這些都給包括我在內的所有作家和讀者帶來了困擾，我敬佩奧威爾，並向他尋求如何思考暴政和壓迫的指導。
The worst of the latter concern his dealings with women. He was compulsively unfaithful, and would pounce on female acquaintances who sometimes had to fight him off physically, especially if they found themselves in a forest or heath with him. (Nature, for Orwell, held an erotic charge.) Yet he did not seem to like women much as human beings. He wrote incel-ish, misogynistic rants for male protagonists of his fiction. And even he admitted that he behaved badly to his first wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy. All of this creates a problem for writers and readers, myself included, who admire Orwell and seek guidance from him in how to think about tyranny and oppression.
- a member of an online community of young men who consider themselves unable to attract women sexually, typically associated with views that are hostile towards women and men who are sexually active."self-identified incels have used the internet to find anonymous support"
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