Talk:George Orwell

Author name

This author wanted to be known as George Orwell. I recall reading that his own wife ended up calling him both Eric and George, "interchangeably". So it seems a bit off (and perhaps also confusing) that the very first words of his profile are the name he did not want to be known by. I suggest inverting the first sentence. Rollo (talk) 16:01, 24 January 2026 (UTC)

We would need a certain amount of sourcing for these points. If you are referring to his second wife, Sonia, they were only married for the last few months of his life, so this may not be decisive. PatGallacher (talk) 19:47, 24 January 2026 (UTC)

"Botched seduction"

I feel like uncritically accepting the Guardian article's wording of the event here is not very clear. At the very least include a quote from the primary source (the biography "Eric and Us") rather than a secondary one to let people come up with their own interpretation. A "botched seduction" sounds like he was awkward and accidentally said she was fat, not that he held her down and assaulted her as she begged for him to stop. It also presents the secondary source as the correct one while the original source and someone closer to the victim is not presented at all. ~2026-76647-1 (talk) 04:04, 4 February 2026 (UTC)

A very fair point. I will go back to the primary public domain source (the postscript version of Eric & Us) and examine if there is any support or clarification on wording from Dione Venables's Diaries housed in the publicly accessible Orwell Archive at UCL. Thanks for pointing this out. Geneus01 (talk) 06:48, 4 February 2026 (UTC)

I have gone back to the postscript and re-examined the Diaries at UCL and find on balance, that Kathryn Hughs’s characterisation as a “botched seduction” is a fair one, albeit reductionist and derivative (with a citation for that derivation). Neither Jacintha Buddicom, her sister Guinever nor her cousin Dione Venables characterised the “incident” as succinctly, if flawed as you describe, although not quite in the way you describe. Eric had held her down and Jacintha had screamed at him to stop and he had (stopped). Your suggestion that he “assaulted her as she begged for him to stop” is your characterisation.

I am grateful for your challenge as it encouraged me to go back to source, where I saw something quite significant in the Diaries I had never spotted before. Geneus01 (talk) 06:18, 6 February 2026 (UTC)