Orwell on Jura: Locating Nineteen Eighty-Four

George Orwell's biographers have been divided about his move to the island of Jura in the last years of his life. Some have seen it as a refuge from the trials of London life during the war; others as a bleak and inaccessible place, chosen in one of Orwell's masochistic gestures. The ordeal of writing Nineteen Eighty-Four on Jura has been described as a suicidal project. But Orwell wanted to be ‘a farmer who wrote’ after the war, for both sentimental and practical reasons. Life on Jura was in some ways healthier and more comfortable than London, and Orwell certainly was happier there than in most other places he lived. If he had survived, he probably would have continued to live in the countryside – still producing his books, but also cultivating his vegetables.