Orwell's Roses

Through a blend of biography, memoir, and meditative essay, Rebecca Solnit explores the life and legacy of English writer George Orwell in Orwell’s Roses (2021). Her discovery that Orwell planted roses in 1936 at his cottage in Wallington, England, led her to take a deeper dive into his work, highlighting his love of nature, his attachment to beauty, and his commitment to social justice and political transparency. She also examines her own journey as a writer, revealing how Orwell impacted her sense of commitment to the truth and how to express it well. Solnit, who credits her career as an essayist partly to Orwell, is the author of several well-received nonfiction books. Her work The Faraway Nearby was nominated for a National Book Award, and she has received numerous accolades, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, for her writing.

This guide references the 2022 paperback edition of Orwell’s Roses from Penguin Books.

Summary

Solnit begins by talking about the Day of the Dead celebrations that honor ancestors both long past and recently deceased. While she’d usually be enjoying such festivities back at home in San Francisco, she’s instead on a train to the northern part of England in search of a cottage, outside which “a writer planted roses” in 1936 (3). Thus begins Solnit’s “quest” to discover more about the legacy of George Orwell—writer, iconoclast, soldier, gardener. Best known for his dystopian novels revealing the deceitful, dehumanizing nature of totalitarianism, as depicted in Animal Farm and 1984 (also published as Nineteen Eighty-Four), Orwell was a writer concerned with Beauty and Truth (see the Themes section) who admired simple pleasures—and was an avid gardener.

Solnit divides her book into seven parts. Part 1, “The Prophet and the Hedgehog,” reveals the impetus behind her desire to reconnect with Orwell. Reading his essay “A Good Word for the Vicar of Bray,” she’s struck by its good humor and its directive to readers to plant a tree as atonement for their bad deeds. She acknowledges the longevity of trees and their ability to bear witness to the events of human history. She’s intrigued by Orwell’s suggestion and, after conducting some research, discovers that he planted roses at his cottage in Wallington—not fruit-bearing trees with practical benefit but roses for their purely aesthetic value. This leads her to examine the metaphorical power of roses—and of flowers in general—to represent the hopes and desires, as well as the sacrifices and loss, endemic to human existence. She provides an overview of Orwell’s life and work, noting that he wrote about many of his experiences—as a police officer in Burma (now Myanmar), as an itinerant worker in Paris and London, as a combatant in the Spanish Civil War—but not about his garden at the cottage. Solnit believes that something in his fascination with hedgehogs—symbolizing the natural world—is as important as his commitment to truth and justice.

In Part 2, “Going Underground,” Solnit explores Orwell’s reporting on the poverty and working conditions of coal miners in the northern parts of England, which culminated in his book The Road to Wigan Pier. Solnit uses this work, which revealed Orwell’s growing dedication to human rights, to investigate the ecological history of coal. She argues that “[p]lants made the world, over and over” (59), trapping sunlight, which eventually became the fossil fuels that made the industrial revolution—and thus the modern world—possible. Ironically, such natural bounty leads to human misery, both for the workers whom Orwell followed and via the environmental devastation wrought by the extraction of coal and oil. She links the infamous London smog to Orwell’s long battle with various lung illnesses.

Part 3, “Bread and Roses,” delves into the history of labor movements and suffragism, both of which employed slogans using “bread and roses.” Bread symbolizes the basics needed for subsistence, while roses symbolize the equally necessary yet less utilitarian aspects of life. Leisure time was just as important as daily bread, they argued, and Solnit agrees. She links this to Orwell’s work: He was just as concerned with creating work of aesthetic value as he was with speaking truth to power; his writing is filled with beauty. Orwell’s reverence for beauty and of nature kept him from becoming swayed by ideologies, as many of his contemporaries were. He was aware of the dangers lurking within the left-leaning side of 20th-century politics.

In Part 4, “Stalin’s Lemons,” Solnit uncovers the excesses of Stalin’s regime in the Soviet Union and notes how many writers were apologists for his atrocities—the alternative being to support the fascism of Hitler in Germany or Franco in Spain, so they thought. Although Orwell loathed fascism, he was highly critical of Stalin’s totalitarian style of government, and these critiques provided him with material for his greatest works. In particular, Solnit notes Orwell’s interest in Soviet science—or, rather, in Stalin’s disregard for factual science in favor of science that supported his interests. Stalin, unlike Orwell, didn’t admire nature. Instead, he wanted nature—and people—to bend to his will. He planted lemon trees in the inhospitable climate of Moscow, attempting to force them into abundance. He failed. Orwell’s truth-telling succeeded, and his roses, appropriately, live on.

In Part 5, “Retreats and Attacks,” Solnit traces the history of gardening and the English aristocracy. The enclosure acts of the 18th and 19th centuries barred common people from public lands, which became the site for the gentry’s country homes. The dislocated farmers fled to the city, where they became the working classes largely responsible for fueling the industrial revolution and its modern comforts. Additionally, the British Empire grew rich off the enslaved labor in distant parts of the world, which explicitly supported the rural idylls of the country home. Thus, the English aristocracy’s wealth was predicated on exploiting the poor at home and the enslaved abroad. Solnit suggests that Orwell, born Eric Blair, changed his name partly to separate himself from his well-to-do ancestors given their dubious past.

Part 6, “The Price of Roses,” brings the narrative to the present day and describes how the dynamic of wealthy nations acquiring creature comforts via the labor of disenfranchised workers abroad persists in the global economy. She investigates the contemporary flower industry, wherein most flowers sold in the US are cultivated and processed in South America. Most of the workers were once small farmers; their disenfranchisement from their land echoes what happened to English farmers in previous centuries. Solnit argues that roses become ugly when one becomes aware that their production relies on the exploitation of workers and the destruction of the environment. This brings her back to Orwell, whose emphasis on the fundamental value of language suggests that writing should honor the truth and remain dedicated to the facts.

In the final part of the book, “The River Orwell,” Solnit writes about Orwell’s last years, which alternated between great sorrow and great joy. He and his wife adopted a son before her death at 39, and he was devoted to the boy. He wanted to raise his son in nature, so they moved away from London after the deprivations and devastation of World War II. He wanted to be closer to his gardening and more focused on his writing. During these years, he penned his most famous books, Animal Farm and 1984, which solidified his reputation as one of the most important writers of his time. However, he was quite ill during this time, in and out of hospitals for tuberculosis, until his untimely death in 1950 at age 46. Solnit posits that Orwell’s legacy celebrates not only truth and social justice but also beauty and joy.