Read an exclusive extract from an upcoming book exploring George Orwell's 'Scotphobia'
Les Wilson outside Barnhill, the house on Jura where George Orwell stayed while he wrote 1984GEORGE Orwell was born Eric Blair on June 25, 1903. Thirty years later, when his first book was published, the name on the cover was not the Norse/Celtic one he had been born with, but a resolutely English name.
By all accounts, the Muirs were charming hosts and rather semi-detached as Scots, with Edwin a proud Orcadian who believed that his family’s move from Orkney to Glasgow was a descent from Eden into Hell, and Willa of Shetland heritage. In the 1950s, Orcadian writer George Mackay Brown found the Muirs “kind and considerate” and an enormous support to him as a young writer, but Orwell would have nothing to do with the couple.
Orwell wrote to Eleanor Jaques saying that he loved Macbeth, and inviting her to a 1932 performance at the Old Vic. It was a generous offer, but a date that was unlikely to further endear him to Scots.Rayner Heppenstall, then a struggling writer eight years younger than Orwell, was one of Orwell’s two flatmates in Kentish Town. Heppenstall found Orwell “a nice old thing, kindly eccentric”.
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