I’m writing on Goerge Orwell and Leonard Woolf, partly because the two are significant literary figures in their own right, and also, partly, because I’m more interested in George Orwell than I am in the entirety of Bloomsbury put together. That, and Leonard Woolf has been incredibly undervalued in the literature—often caricatured as a despotic husband that constantly damaged with his brilliant wife’s sanity. *
George Orwell, on the other hand, has always had a strong following. Accepted in his own day as a literary giant, his name has since come to be synonymous with masterful prose and [JP1] incisive political criticism. What can we gain from placing both literary figures together? What does the contrast tell us about two different strands of British social and political thinking?
Woolf and Orwell share many things in common, not the least of which being their commitment to socialism. While Woolf was an outspoken Fabian Society member who even ran for the Labor party, Orwell always viewed himself as a political independent who continually criticized what he saw as the unthinking and uncritical nature of British Socialist orthodoxy.[1] *[JP2] Orwell and Woolf’s lives also converge and diverge on the matter of biography as well: both served as colonial administrators early in their careers and wrote novels based on their experience, though with incredibly different styles and objectives. Yet, though both came to despise Imperialism and the economic exploitation it implied, they expressed it through very different means. Woolf wrote extensively on the imperialist system in books like Economic Imperialism and Empire and Commerce in Africa, where George Orwell confined himself mainly to the odd sniping comment or reflection in his essays.
Since Orwell and Woolf shared such oddly parallel lives it would be easy to conclude that the most major difference between them was simply generational. Offset by around twenty years, the two are natural dissimilar in outlook because they came from varying backgrounds—Woolf was a member of Bloomsbury high society, while Orwell was a middle-class writer for most his life. But, though we could simply determine the two to be contrasted through historical accidents, I’m not certain that this would be very convincing or very fruitful. Rather, I propose to analyze the contrasts between the two not only as indicative of different sub-societies, but of differing views on british socialism in the early 20th century. Along the way, I’ll also perform the mandatory exigesis of their two novels, Woolf’s A Village in the Jungle, and Orwell’s Burmese Days for signs of their different views toward imperialism and socialism as well.
I have several hypotheses on how the difference might characterize itself over time:
1. Both writers were discussing different forms of socialism entirely. A generational gap, as described above.
2. Leonard’s association with Bloomsbury and “Bloomsbury ideals” implicates him in the larger debate. Orwell, as the quintessential outsider, never had such connections and thus was able to sell himself much more effectively as an independent political commentator.
3. Orwell’s fiction innovated over Woolf’s, as Woolf’s largely was much less political than Orwell’s.
4. This would lead to a different approach in “selling” socialism. Woolf was, on the one hand, much more predictable. He attended rallies, published pamphlets, and ran for office. Orwell, concerned largely with how language itself interacted with society, distanced himself from such measures.
I hope to arrive at some kind of unifed synthesis of the above ideas. If any of you have questions or comments about this plan, or would like to tell something helpful about it, let me know.
[1] See his famous essay, “the Lion and the Unicorn” in the collected volume of his criticism; George Orwell, Critical Essays, Reset ed. (London: Secker and Warburg, 1946).
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