Orwell in Southwold: His Life and Writings in a Suffolk Town

George Orwell first came to live in Southwold in 1921, beginning an association with the town which lasted more than twenty years. He lived at four addresses in the town and this book provides the first full, authoritative account of Orwell’s connection with Southwold, its people and the books which he wrote while living there. Using original archival research, Binns reveals new material about the two local women with whom Orwell became infatuated, together with previously unpublished photographs of them. Apart from untangling the complicated chronology of Orwell’s association with Southwold, this account examines the impact which the town made upon his writing from his first book, Down and Out in Paris and London, to his last, Nineteen Eighty-Four. It also includes a detailed analysis of his satirical account of the town in A Clergyman’s Daughter. Orwell in Southwold contains 30 photographs and two maps, showing the local sites important to Orwell both in Southwold and in the surrounding Suffolk countryside.