Our Job Is To Make Life Worth Living

Volume 20 of The Complete Works of George Orwell

In 'Reflections on Gandhi', published in January 1949, in which he modified the strictures made in a previous review, Orwell wrote, 'our job is to make life worth living on this earth, which is the only earth we have'.

While a patient at the Cotswold Sanatorium, Cranham, he read the proofs of Nineteen Eighty-Four and wrote five reviews. He began, but did not finish, an article on Evelyn Waugh, made notes for an essay on Conrad, and sketched out a long short-story, 'A Smoking-Room Story'.

The volume includes many unpublished letters, Warburg's report on his visit to Cranham, a clarification of Orwell's public statement on Nineteen Eighty-Four, and a detailed examination, with all the relevant correspondence, of Orwell's relationship with the Information Research Department of the Foreign Office. Two of the last items are a cheerful letter from Nancy Parratt, one of his BBC secretaries, and a letter from Sonia Orwell (whom Orwell had married a few weeks after he was transferred to University College Hospital, London).

The volume concludes with a series of appendices. These print all work in progress; a statement of Orwell's accounts; a list of the 144 books he read in 1949; Orwell's will and final instructions for his literary executors; the names in his address book; those he considered cryptos or fellow-travellers; a list of books he owned and another of his pamphlet collection; an unpublished memoir by Miranda wood; and a note of what happened after Orwell's death on 21 January 1950.