Rehabilitating Sonia Orwell

George Orwell’s wife Sonia, whome th author married three months before his death, “was completely demonized,” says a new biography. Previous biographers have created “a hardhearted, mercenary gold digger who looked like a painting by Renoir and married a skeleton on his deathbed.” By contrast, the new book portrays Sonia as “the most generous person – for her to be reimagined as a monster of cold-heartedness and greed is staggering and extremely distressing.”