Orwell's Roses
Author(s): Rebecca Solnit
History | Politics | Gardening | Literature | Read our reviews!
Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction
Finalist for the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography
"An exhilarating romp through Orwell's life and times and also through the life and times of roses." --Margaret Atwood
"A captivating account of Orwell as gardener, lover, parent, and endlessly curious thinker." --Claire Messud, Harper's
"Nobody who reads it will ever think of Nineteen Eighty-Four in quite the same way." --Vogue
A lush exploration of politics, roses, and pleasure, and a fresh take on George Orwell as an avid gardener whose political writing was grounded by his passion for the natural world
"In the spring of 1936, a writer planted roses." So be-gins Rebecca Solnit's new book, a reflection on George Orwell's passionate gardening and the way that his involvement with plants, particularly flowers, illuminates his other commitments as a writer and antifascist, and on the intertwined politics of nature and power.
Sparked by her unexpected encounter with the roses he reportedly planted in 1936, Solnit's account of this overlooked aspect of Orwell's life journeys through his writing and his actions--from going deep into the coal mines of England, fighting in the Spanish Civil War, critiquing Stalin when much of the international left still supported him (and then critiquing that left) to his analysis of the relationship between lies and authoritarianism.
Through Solnit's celebrated ability to draw unexpected connections, readers are drawn onward from Orwell's own work as a writer and gardener to encounter photographer Tina Modotti's roses and her politics, agriculture and illusion in the USSR of his time with forcing lemons to grow in impossibly cold conditions, Orwell's slave-owning ancestors in Jamaica, Jamaica Kincaid's examination of colonialism and imperialism in the flower garden, and the brutal rose industry in Colombia that supplies the American market.
The book draws to a close with a rereading of Nineteen Eighty-Four that completes Solnit's portrait of a more hopeful Orwell, as well as offering a meditation on pleasure, beauty, and joy as acts of resistance.
STELLA'S REVIEW:
I’ve been dipping into this book for several weeks, savouring the writing and meandering the country tracks of England with Solnit and her revelations of Orwell the writer and the lover of nature. Solnit’s collections of essays are usually directly political, even her more nuanced observations which are often drawn from personal experiences or wry commentary are to a greater or lesser extent ‘serious’. In Orwell’s Roses, one could be forgiven for thinking at the outset, this biography (of a sort) has a different purpose. It meanders. As we walk with Rebecca Solnit on English country paths she talks to us as if we were wandering beside her — it is a conversation about her discoveries, filled with curiosity and at times, surprise, as she reveals a side of George Orwell not usually found in his books (most famously Animal Farm and 1984) and essays, nor in literary references. The roses which inspire Solnit were planted by Orwell in the late 1930s in his garden — a constant source of pleasure — at his Hertfordshire cottage. Knocking on the door of the cottage, the present-day owners take her into the garden and point out what they believe to be those same rose bushes, and so starts a connection to the past and Orwell’s ideas — ideas that resonate just as vividly right now. His passionate defence of freedom and his fight against totalitarianism — both in written word and deed (as a soldier in the Spanish Civil War) — and advocacy for greater equality, in particular for workers' rights, are all relevant in our present world order and are also concerns at the heart of Solnit’s own work. Like Orwell, Solnit is hard-hitting and does not easily succumb to telling what is wanted to be heard. She reveals in many of her essays historical facts and political analysis that may be difficult to confront, and Orwell similarly was going his own way as he felt necessary. While in Spain, Orwell became increasingly uncomfortable with some of his fellow freedom fighters, who continued to follow Stalin even when it was obvious that the communist ideal was failing and falling under the boot of dictatorship. In expressing his love of flowers and gardens, he was accused of having bourgeois interests — an indulgence that seemed frivolous to some — not a serious political left-wing stance. However, he exhorted that workers needed beauty as well as bread. In thinking about Solnit’s own writing, this element of beauty or (more particularly in reference to her) hope, is never far from the political imperative. Orwell’s Roses is a book of many parts: biography, a potted history of Orwell’s time through a particular and precise lens (coal mines, the civil war, his own family’s rise and fall through the class system), his love of nature, roses — their beauty expressed in literature, art and as themselves as flowers — and a comparative history (in one chapter is an overview of Orwell’s writing about the coal-miners and later in the book, Solnit visits a ‘rose factory’ in Columbia where workers are exploited and roses are grown en masse for the American market). It is a wander, but an extremely well-written and a thought-proving one, packed with intriguing anecdotes and considered analysis. Much like a rose coming into bloom it holds your fascination. Solnit cleverly draws together all these aspects and reminds us that through a desire for beauty over hatred, and through language and words, we too, like Orwell, can raise our voices against repression.
What are the links between political engagement and our engagement with the natural world? In Orwell's Roses, Rebecca Solnit takes a rose garden planted by George Orwell as the starting point for a meandering journey through his life, writings and motivations, and through much else besides, arriving at a more nuanced and somehow hopeful assessment of what it means to care about the state of the world in our own century.
>>Rebecca Solnit and Margaret Atwood!
>>A new perspective.
>>Pleasure and flowers.
>>The written political project.
>>The Orwell Foundation.
>>Other books by Rebecca Solnit.
>>Some books by and about George Orwell.
I loved this book, and so will many... an exhilarating romp through Orwell's life and times and also through the life and times of roses -- Margaret Atwood
This book is brilliant because it is true, and because it rescues Orwell from a kind of dourness and seriousness, and gives him back his humanity and yes, his Englishness. -- James Rebanks, author of English Pastoral and The Shepherd's Life
I so loved this book. It unfolds like the petals of a rose - the political rose, the personal rose - and enacts its subject in the ethics of its beauty and the grace of its resistance -- Jay Griffiths, author of Why Rebel
We all know what Orwell hated but Solnit pays attention to what he loved. Orwell's Roses is an ingeniously fresh and unpredictable take on his life and times, and the values he held dear -- Dorian Lynskey
There is nothing more political than a garden, and Rebecca Solnit brings Orwell's life and writing vividly alive through his quiet determination to love the surface of the earth. Orwell's Roses shows how intimately aesthetics is intertwined with ethics, and in doing so, Solnit has given us a truly beautiful book -- Alex Christofi, author of Dostoevsky in Love
This an enchanting book, as powerful in its arguments as it is enjoyable to read. From a surprising close-up of George Orwell planting three Woolworth roses, Solnit pans to a bracing new vista of the man and his fierce political aesthetic, taking in the injustices of the rose industry and lying Soviet science as she goes. Brilliant -- Lisa Appignanesi
This elegant rambling rose of a book muses on Orwell with all Rebecca Solnit's luminous intelligence and trademark optimism. If "Orwellian" has become synonymous with darkness and oppression, she opens up his life affirming love of gardening, of wild nature and life's physical pleasure, his antidote to the grim puritanism of ideologues -- Polly Toynbee
A tribute by one fine essayist of the political left to another of an earlier generation... the great pleasure of reading [Solnit] is spending time with her mind, its digressions and juxtapositions, its unexpected connections. Only a few contemporary writers have the ability to start almost anywhere and lead the reader on paths that, while apparently meandering, compel unfailingly and feel, by the end, cosmically connected . .. The book provides a captivating account of Orwell as gardener, lover, parent, and endlessly curious thinker -- Claire Messud * Harper's Magazine *
The green-fingered and the politically committed alike will want to curl up with this book as the gardening year draws to a close and we reflect on a time during which nature has been more of a solace than usual. * Observer *
Elegantly light-footed and freewheeling... a marvellously bracing ramble that passes through a variety of intellectual terrain and physical landscapes * Daily Telegraph *
Expansive and thought-provoking... In the hands of a skilled novelist or essayist like Solnit, biography becomes something else entirely * Independent *
Idiosyncratic, immensely original work * i paper *
Luminous ... part biography, part memoir, a historical and cultural analysis and a work of literary criticism, Solnit's book is a love letter in prose to those roses, to Orwell and to the enduring relevance of his ethical sensibility. It is efflorescent, a study that seeds and blooms, propagates thoughts, and tends to historical associations * New Statesman *
The book itself, like petals of a rose unfurling, conveys hope for a better future... a genuinely exceptional mind, whose curiosity, intelligence and willingness to learn seem unbounded * Irish Times *
An absorbing read for those with interests in politics and gardening alike * Sunday Telegraph *
An entertaining ramble through the author's life and Solnit's consciousness... this rhizomatic exercise yields great blooms * Big Issue *
Solnit makes us rethink "Orwellian" to mean not just what he was against but what he was for - nature. Her brilliant essays give colour back to an author we often think of as grey * Daily Telegraph *
This hybrid volume blossoms with... insights, non sequiturs and epiphanies -- Margaret Drabble * TLS *
A pleasing meditation on the small pleasures and intricate beauties of nature, and a book to see you through to spring -- Books of the year * The Times and Sunday Times *
Wonderful and moving... Fine and thoughtful * Spectator *
Author Biography: REBECCA SOLNIT is the author of more than twenty books, including Recollections of My Non-Existence, which was longlisted for the 2021 Orwell Prize for Political Writing and shortlisted for the 2021 James Tait Black Award, The Faraway Nearby, Wanderlust, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, River of Shadows and A Paradise Built in Hell. She is also the author of Men Explain Things to Me and many essays on feminism, activism, social change, hope, and the climate crisis. A contributing editor to Harper's, she writes regularly for the Guardian, the London Review of Books and the Los Angeles Times. She lives in San Francisco.
Product Information
General Fields
- :
- : Granta
- : Granta Paperbacks
- : 226.0
- : 01 September 2022
- : {"length"=>["19.8"], "width"=>["12.9"], "units"=>["Centimeters"]}
- : 01 September 2022
- : books
Special Fields
- : Rebecca Solnit
- : Paperback
- : English
- : 823.912
- : 320
- : BGL
