The Lost Orwell

Peter Davison’s twenty-volume edition of The Complete Works of George Orwell was published to international acclaim in 1998. The Lost Orwell assembles all the new material discovered in the past eight years – a treasure trove of letters and documents that will substantially redefine our image of one of the twentieth century’s most important writers. Included in this collection are a run of letters from Orwell’s first wife, Eileen, which shed a revealing light on the early years of their marriage, a long sequence exchanged between the author of Down and Out in Paris and London with his French translator; tantalising fragments of correspondence with a woman to whom he proposed marriage in the 1930s and several letters to Malcolm Muggeridge written during the time Orwell was at work on Nineteen Eighty-Four. Among other important finds are letters to the editor of the Moscow journal, International Literature, shortly afterwards executed in a Gulag, and a Catalan comrade from the Spanish Civil War. Bringing together several other intriguing documents, such as the notorious ‘list of Crypto-Communists Orwell sent to the International Research Department shortly before his death in 1950 and many rare photographs, The Lost Orwell is a landmark in Orwell studies.