Orwell's Roses

Nonfiction | Biography | Adult | Published in 2021

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6

Part 7

Key Figures

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Background

Sociohistorical Context: War and Empire

Orwell’s life was punctuated by war: “He was born on June 25, 1903, right after the Boer War, reached adolescence during the First World War […] with the Russian Revolution and the Irish war of independence raging into the 1920s and the beginning of his adulthood” (8). Then came the Spanish Civil War, in which he fought and was shot, and the Second World War, from which he reported. Orwell even has the dubious honor of “coin[ing] the term cold war in 1945” (9), which describes the long period of political tension between the East, as represented by the Soviet Union, and the West, as represented by Europe and the US. Solnit notes that Orwell’s response to such forces was to celebrate nature and find respite in gardening: “Those conflicts and menaces consumed a lot of his attention—but not all of it” (9).

In the essay that first captivates Solnit’s imagination, “A Good Word for the Vicar of Bray,” Orwell explicitly makes a connection between the endurance of nature and the destructive tendencies of war. He suggests that the vicar, who changed sides during the debates over religion in his time, was actually a savvy operator: “That fickleness let him survive and stay in place, like a tree, while many fell or fled” (7). Orwell thus linked steadfastness to nature, though as his life showed, nature doesn’t always prevail. Solnit recounts that in the same essay, Orwell discusses “the last king of Burma” (7), who planted some trees in Mandalay. Unlike the vicar’s sturdy tree, however, the king’s trees were victims of war: His “’tamarind trees [...] cast a pleasant shade until the Japanese incendiary bombs burned them down in 1942” (7). In another of Orwell’s essays, “The Lion and the Unicorn,” he explicitly acknowledges the war raging outside his window: “’As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me’” (190). This was during the Blitz of London, when Germany rained bombs over the city during the Second World War. To counter the pervasiveness and inhumanity of war, Orwell took refuge in nature, according to Solnit.

The nature in which Orwell took pleasure, however, is sometimes tainted by the historical forces that create it. Solnit discusses how the English countryside was shaped not only by political acts that excluded the general public from access but also by the imperial dynamics through which wealth was derived. That is, the enclosure acts prevented commoners from holding (or even enjoying) much of England’s land, which was controlled by the aristocracy. Members of the aristocracy, in turn, could afford to manage the land and enjoy their leisure via the wealth they garnered from enslaved colonies trading in products like sugar. Orwell’s Scottish ancestors were involved in this process, though they lost their inherited wealth—if not their class privilege—in generations before his.

Still, Orwell’s attachment to nature was a kind of antidote to these historical forces. His gardening offered a respite from the events of war and empire through which he lived, which were often overwhelmingly destructive and inhumane. His attachment to nature was also a respite from his physical ailments. Like Winston Smith, his protagonist in 1984, Orwell was ultimately undone not by torture, as in Winston’s case, but by poor health. However, “he has managed to live first, and though those victories are fleeting they are victories” (259). As Solnit suggests, had Winston Smith—by extension, George Orwell himself—not taken any chances, he never truly would have lived. Orwell’s admiration of beauty and his connection to nature were the other parts to his epic life, the parts wherein the horrors of war were cancelled out by the pleasures of the organic world.

Literary Context: Mixed Mediums

Solnit’s work often combines various methods and genres. Orwell’s Roses is itself a blend of biography, in which she traces the trajectory of Orwell’s life and work; memoir, in which she charts her own career as a writer; essay, in which she analyzes history and politics; journalism, in which she investigates and reports on particular subjects; and literary criticism, in which she interprets some of Orwell’s most significant writing. While these are all distinctly different mediums, Solnit unites them to create a cohesive narrative about Orwell’s legacy, the importance of truth and beauty, and her own thoughts about what makes writing meaningful.

Solnit notes that her book shouldn’t be considered a biography: “There are many biographies of Orwell, and they’ve served me well for this book, which is not an addition to that shelf” (15). The book isn’t a clear chronological account of Orwell’s life, nor does it focus solely on Orwell. It’s also a book about roses in particular and nature in general—and about ecological devastation, economic exploitation, global inequality, and the legacies of slavery and colonialism, among other subjects. Still, the book is shelved, in bookstores and libraries alike, among the biographies, and it was a finalist for the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award—in the category Biography. In addition, the book is clearly a writer’s memoir, an account of Solnit’s own commitment to a particular kind of writing that Orwell exemplified. Her writing, like his, defies easy categorization, and she doesn’t wish to be labeled as one kind of writer or another.

As a book of essays, many of the chapters in Orwell’s Roses could stand alone. Each section contains its own thematic concern, though all sections are linked by the main topics of Orwell—which also infers his “Orwellian” legacy—and roses, which function as a synecdoche for both aesthetic beauty and natural integrity. These main topics often provide starting points for Solnit’s ruminations on other subjects; for example, Orwell’s interviews with coal miners for The Road to Wigan Pier offers Solnit the opportunity to delve into how plant matter creates coal and oil—two foundations of the modern world.

Her forays into the contemporary flower industry read as investigative journalism, in the tradition of the New Journalists, who combined first-person experience with fact-based, immersive research. Solnit flies to Colombia to report firsthand on the working conditions and ecological impact of the “rose factory,” filtering the situation through her experience. Her writing emphasizes the juxtaposition between the “rose” (an organic, beautiful object) and the “factory” (a mechanized shop). In addition, she highlights the poverty of the people she encounters in Bogota, implying that the wealth generated by the factories is not, in fact, invested in local communities. Just as Orwell exposed the injustices and inhumane working conditions that coal miners of his day endured, Solnit works to reveal the same problems inherent in the contemporary flower industry.

In the mode of literary criticism, Solnit provides exegeses of many of Orwell’s books, including The Road to Wigan Pier and 1984, as well as the essays “A Good Vicar of Bray” and “Politics and the English Language.” She wants to correct the conventional view of his work as grim and hopeless—“Orwellian” in its dystopian vision—and commits to a close reading of his work, emphasizing his commitment to Beauty and Truth. Solnit posits that the beauty of his writing rests in its commitment to truth, which is beautiful because it honors ethical standards.

To tie together the wide-ranging topics, Solnit uses extended metaphors, recurring motifs, and a cohesive focus on Orwell’s eponymous roses. Each part but one begins with a sentence alluding to Orwell’s act of planting roses at the cottage in Wallington: “In the spring of 1936, a writer planted roses,” the book begins (3). “In the spring of 1936, a man planted roses,” it continues (51). “In the year 1936, a young writer planted roses,” it concludes (235). In these repetitions, Solnit emphasizes the significance of a writer—renowned for his ethical commitments to truth and justice—planting such beautiful objects.