Orwell and Feminism

Abstract The story of Orwell’s relationship with feminism reveals ties that are as strong, persistent, and productive as any he forged with other political movements and ideologies. This chapter maps out several of the most important critical consequences of the vexed, contradictory, more than century-long relationship between Orwell and feminism for twenty-first-century feminist and non-feminist readers by asking: What has Orwell done for feminism? What has feminism done and what might it do for Orwell? It finds its answers in literary, biographical, and cultural criticism by Beatrix Campbell, Daphne Patai, Janet Montefiore, Alison Light, Nick Hubble, Ben Clarke, and D. J. Taylor, among others, as well as in the fiction and letters of Orwell’s contemporaries Virginia Woolf, Naomi Mitchison, Jacintha Buddicom, and Walter Greenwood.