What Does George Orwell’s ‘1984’ Mean in 2024?

Now 75 years old, the dystopian novel still rings alarm bells about totalitarian rule
Seventy-five years after its publication on June 8, 1949, Orwell’s novel has attained a level of
prominence enjoyed by few other books across academic, political and popular culture. 1984’s
meaning has been co-opted by groups across the political spectrum, and it consequently serves as a
kind of political barometer. It has been smuggled behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War and
used as counterpropaganda by the CIA; at moments of political crisis, it has skyrocketed to the top of
best-seller lists.

The language and imagery in the novel—which Anthony Burgess, author of A Clockwork Orange,
once called “an apocalyptical codex of our worst fears”—have also been reinterpreted in music,
television, advertisements and films, shaping how people view and discuss the terror of political
oppression. The terms the book introduced into the English language, like “Big Brother” and
“thought police,” are common parlance today. “Big Brother” is now a long-running reality TV show.
1984-like surveillance is possible through a range of tracking technologies. And the contortion of
truth is realizable via artificial intelligence deepfakes. In a world that is both similar to and distinct
from Orwell’s imagined society, what does 1984 mean today?

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Jean Seaton, director of the Orwell Foundation and a historian at the University of Westminster in
England, says that 1984 has become a way to “take the temperature” of global politics. “It goes up
and down because people reinvent it [and] because people turn to it … to refresh [their] grasp on the
present. It’s useful because you think, ‘How bad are we in comparison to this?’”

In 1984, three totalitarian states rule the world in a détente achieved by constant war. The all-seeing
Party dominates a grimly uniform society in the bloc called Oceania. As a low-level Party member,
protagonist Winston Smith’s job is to rewrite historical records to match the ever-changing official
version of events. As a Party slogan puts it, “Who controls the past controls the future: Who controls
the present controls the past.”

Winston begins to document his contrarian thoughts and starts an illicit affair with a woman named
Julia, but the two are soon caught and tortured into obedience by the regime. Ultimately, Smith’s
individuality and attempt to rebel are brutally suppressed. While most contemporary societies are
nothing like the book’s dystopia, in the context of today’s proliferating misinformation and
disinformation, the Party’s primary propaganda slogans—“War is peace,” “Freedom is slavery” and
“Ignorance is strength”—don’t seem all that far-fetched.

George Orwell, author of 1984 and Animal Farm

George Orwell, the author of 1984 and Animal Farm ullstein bild via Getty Images
According to Orwell’s son, Richard Blair, the writer thought his novel would “either be a best seller or
the world [would] ignore it. He wasn’t quite sure which of the two it would be.” But soon after its
publication, 1984’s best-seller status became clear. The book has since sold around 30 million copies.
It most recently returned to the top of the American best-seller list in January 2017, after a Trump
administration adviser coined the doublespeak term “alternative facts.”

“It’s a very relevant book … to the world of today,” Blair says. “The broad issue [is] the manipulation
of truth, something that large organizations and governments are very good at.”
Many other dystopian novels carry similar warnings. So why does 1984 have such staying power?
Orwell’s novels “all have exactly the same plot,” says the author’s biographer D.J. Taylor. “They are all
about solitary, ground-down individuals trying to change the nature of their lives … and ultimately
being ground down by repressive authority.”

1984, Taylor adds, is the apotheosis of Orwell’s fears and hypotheses about surveillance and
manipulation: “It takes all the essential elements of Orwell’s fiction and then winds them up another
couple of notches to make something really startling.” Orwell’s precise, nightmarish vision contains
enough familiar elements to map onto the known world, giving it a sense of alarming plausibility.

A row of Ministry of Information posters on a wall in the United Kingdom in 1942

A row of Ministry of Information posters on a wall in the United Kingdom in 1942 Imperial War
Museum (D 12029)
The novel traces the dystopian future onto recognizable London landmarks. “The really scary thing
for the original readers in 1949 was that although it was set in 1984, it’s there: It’s bomb-cratered,
war-torn, postwar England,” says Taylor. The University of London’s Senate House inspired the novel’s
“Ministry of Truth,” as it had housed the Ministry of Information during World War II’s propaganda
push.

Born Eric Blair in 1903, Orwell had a short but prolific writing career, chronicling politics, poverty and
social injustice before his early death from tuberculosis in January 1950, just seven months after
1984’s publication. Though an accomplished essayist, Orwell is best known for 1984 and Animal
Farm, his 1945 satire of Stalinist Russia.

Born in Bengal when the region was under British colonial rule, Orwell studied at Eton College but
left the school to follow his father into the civil service. He became disillusioned with the colonial
British Raj while serving in the Indian Imperial Police in Burma, an experience that inspired his first
novel, Burmese Days. In 1927, Orwell returned to England and Europe, where he immersed himself
in working-class poverty to write Down and Out in Paris and London and The Road to Wigan Pier. He
fought against fascism in the Spanish Civil War, almost dying from a throat wound. The conflict
reinforced his socialist politics: “Everything he wrote after that was against totalitarianism [and] for
democracy,” Blair says.

Photo of Orwell from his Metropolitan Police file

Orwell died just seven months after 1984's publication in June 1949. National Archives via Wikimedia
Commons
Orwell wrote 1984 while battling tuberculosis on the Isle of Jura in Scotland, aware that his condition
was deteriorating as he wrote the novel, Taylor says. Upon finishing the manuscript, he went to a
London hospital for treatment, where he married editorial assistant Sonia Brownell from his hospital
bed. The writer died three months later at age 46. Blair, whom Orwell had adopted with his first wife,
Eileen O’Shaughnessy, shortly before her death in 1945, was 5 years old at the time.

Though Orwell described 1984 as a warning rather than a prophecy, scholars have demonstrated
significant interest in mapping the author’s imaginings onto the modern world. “When I started
writing, what I was involved in was something you could call ‘Orwell Studies.’ And now there's an
Orwell industry,” says Taylor, who has published two biographies of the author. (His latest, released in
2023, was informed by new primary source material.)

Taylor attributes this popularity to Orwell’s “uncanny ability … to predict so many of the things that
trouble us here in the 2020s.” He notes that in the United Kingdom, Orwell mainly draws political and
literary audiences, while in the United States, scientific circles are increasingly curious about Orwell’s
foreshadowing of modern technology and surveillance methods.

A poster from a 2013 protest against the National Security Agency invokes Orwell's image.
A poster from a 2013 protest against the National Security Agency invokes Orwell's image.
NurPhoto / Corbis via Getty Images
“There’s something about his work that keeps getting reinvented and reactivated” in relation to
events that happened well after Orwell’s death, says Alex Woloch, a literary scholar at Stanford
University. “I think of Orwell as a text that people can turn to in confronting many different kinds of
political problems, and particularly propaganda, censorship and political duplicity.”

Orwell’s “main relevance in the U.S. was forged during the Cold War,” Woloch says. A democratic
socialist and anti-Stalinist, Orwell was able to “represent the contradictions of the communist
ideology, the gap between its self-image and its reality.” 1984 and Animal Farm “were understood as
the exemplary anti-communist texts,” embedded in U.S. curriculums and widely taught in the
decades since.

“With the end of the Cold War,” Woloch adds, “Orwell’s writing could be claimed by many different
people who were arguing against what they saw as various forms of political deceptiveness,” from
the Marxist Black Panther Party to the ultraconservative John Birch Society.

“It’s very difficult to think of another writer who’s so much admired across all parts of the political
spectrum,” Taylor says. “He’s almost unique in that way.”

Adapted to the needs of a broad range of readers, 1984 took on a life beyond its author and its
pages. In her forthcoming book, George Orwell and Communist Poland: Émigré, Official and
Clandestine Receptions, Krystyna Wieszczek, a research fellow at Columbia University, explores the
use of 1984 as a tool of resistance. The novel “provided an easy-to-use vocabulary … that [readers]
could use to name the phenomenon” of oppression, Wieszczek says. Copies were smuggled into
Poland and other countries behind the Iron Curtain that divided Eastern Europe from Western
Europe, some even in the diplomatic bag of a secretary to the French Embassy in Warsaw.

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In the 1950s, a CIA operation sent Animal Farm and other “printed matter from the West [into
communist countries] in gas-filled balloons,” Wieszczek says. But many Poles objected to this tactic,
fearing a reprise of the devastating and unsuccessful 1944 Warsaw Uprising. Through distribution
points across Europe, the U.S. also sent millions of copies of anti-communist literature, including
1984, to Poland. According to Wieszczek, surveys suggest that as much as 26 percent of Poland’s
adult population—around seven million people—had some access to clandestine publications in the
1980s. Polish émigré imprints like Kultura in Paris also ensured banned publications reached
audiences in the Eastern bloc during the Cold War. Cheekily, one of Kultura’s editions of 1984 even
used a “Soviet militant poster as a cover,” Wieszczek says.

“Many people read 1984 as a very negative, pessimistic book, but … it had a kind of liberating impact
… for some readers,” she explains. They were reading a banned book about banned books that
reflected, to an extent, their own circumstances.
“1984 is a horrible book,” Wieszczek adds. “You never forget—it stays with you, this big pressure on
the chest and the stomach. But somehow, it brought hope. There was this man on other side of the
Iron Curtain who understood us. … There is hope because people understand.”

A protean text for political, intellectual and underground movements, 1984 has also resonated in
popular culture. Its myriad artistic interpretations are explored in Dorian Lynskey’s The Ministry of
Truth: The Biography of George Orwell’s 1984. The novel inspired television shows, films, plays, a
David Bowie album (though Orwell’s widow, Sonia, turned down the artist’s offer to create a 1984
musical) and even a “Victory gin” based on the grim spirits described in the novel. It was cited in
songs by John Lennon and Stevie Wonder and named by assassin Lee Harvey Oswald as one of his
favorite books. And its imagery continues to inform the public’s perception of what might happen if
1984 weren’t fiction after all.

While the term “Orwellian” can be used to describe Orwell’s style, “the classic use … is for politicians
[who] grotesquely misuse language for ideological purposes and use language to disguise or pervert
reality rather than to expose it,” Woloch says. Today, the phrase has become a “floating signifier,”
Taylor says. “It’s so regularly used it doesn’t actually mean anything.” He cites a politician misusing
“Orwellian” to complain about a perceived personal injustice (a canceled book contract).

“[Orwell’s] books have such widespread currency that you can use him to describe anything, really,”
Taylor adds. “The word can mean anything and nothing at the same time.”

This is ironic, given how precise Orwell was about language. The reduction of language and creative
thought to “Newspeak” in the novel figures largely in the population’s oppression. Orwell “was
passionately committed to language as a contract crucial to all our other contracts,” writes Rebecca
Solnit in Orwell’s Roses. He is “an exemplar of writing as the capacity to communicate other people’s
experience,” Seaton says, “… so to read Orwell is, in a sense, to defend language and writing.”

Orwell’s main question, according to Woloch, “is how, as a thinking person and a fair-minded person,
… do you confront the genuine pervasiveness of political problems that make up the world that we’re
in?” The scholar quotes Orwell’s famous line from a 1938 New Leader essay: “It is not possible for
any thinking person to live in such a society as our own without wanting to change it.”

“The big three themes [of 1984] that people ought to bear in mind,” Taylor suggests, “are the denial
of objective truth, which we see everywhere about us, every war that’s currently taking place
anywhere in the world and in quite a lot of domestic political situations, too; the manipulation of
language … and the use of words to bamboozle people; and the rise of the surveillance society. …
That to me, is the definition of the adjective ‘Orwellian’ in the 21st century.”

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Anne Wallentine
Anne Wallentine
READ MORE
Anne Wallentine is a writer and art historian with a focus on the intersections of art, culture and
health. A graduate of Washington University in St. Louis and the Courtauld Institute of Art, she writes
for outlets that include the Financial Times, the Economist, the Art Newspaper and Hyperallergic.

Are We Living in Orwell’s 1984?

I was listening to the "The Online Great Books Podcast" entitled "Are We Living in Orwell’s 1984?".
One of the podcasters had only read the book for the purpose of the podcast and disliked it strongly
as he believed the book functioned as how to manual for would-be authoritarians (he thought the
same of Gulag Archipelago).

Assuming that we are living in the lead up to an Orwellian dystopia right now, the question was
posed: How do we assuming we recognizing that fact in the moment, stop it from happening as
individuals?

Reading 1984, George Orwell’s claustrophobic fable of totalitarianism, is still a shock. First comes the
start of recognition: we recognise what he describes. Doublethink (holding two contradictory
thoughts at the same time), Newspeak, the Thought Police, the Ministry of Love that deals in pain,
despair and annihilates any dissident, the Ministry of Peace that wages war, the novel-writing
machines that pump out pornography to buy off the masses: Orwell opened our eyes to how regimes
worked.
Today it is social media that collects every gesture, purchase, comment we make online
But now we can read 1984 differently: with anxious apprehension, using it to measure where we, our
nations and the world have got to on the road map to a hell Orwell described. Prophetic? Possibly.
But stirring, moving, creative, undeniable and helpful? Yes. A book published on 8 June 1949, written
out of the battered landscape of total war, in a nation hungry, tired and grey, feels more relevant
than ever before, because Orwell’s 1984 also arms us.
More like this:

- The fiction that changed history

- An ancient poem that still sums up war

- Why The Handmaid’s Tale is so relevant today

The book, with its disorientating first sentence, “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were
striking thirteen”, defines the peculiar characteristics of modern tyranny. Winston Smith, the
protagonist, works as a censor in the Ministry of Truth in a constant updating of history to suit
present circumstances and shifting alliances. He and his fellow workers are controlled as a mass
collective by the all-seeing and all-knowing presence of Big Brother. In 1984 television screens watch
you, and everyone spies on everyone else. Today it is social media that collects every gesture,
purchase, comment we make online, and feeds an omniscient presence in our lives that can predict
our every preference. Modelled on consumer choices, where the user is the commodity that is being
marketed, the harvesting of those preferences for political campaigns is now distorting democracy.
Alamy In 1984 it is a TV screen that watches you – today social media is an omniscient presence
(Credit: Alamy)Alamy
In 1984 it is a TV screen that watches you – today social media is an omniscient presence (Credit:
Alamy)
Orwell understood that oppressive regimes always need enemies. In 1984 he showed how these can
be created arbitrarily by whipping up popular feeling through propaganda. But in his description of
the ‘Two Minutes Hate’ he also foresaw the way in which online mobs work. Obliged to watch the
violent film, (as everyone is), Winston Smith observes “The horrible thing about the Two Minutes
Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but that it was impossible to avoid joining in…A
hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a
sledgehammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current”. Now
political, religious and commercial organisations all trade in whipping up feelings. Orwell uncannily
identified the willing collusion in hate that such movements can elicit: and of course Winston
observes it in himself. So, by implication might we, in ourselves.
Alamy Orwell’s iconic dictator Big Brother is absurd and horrifying in equal measure (Credit:
Alamy)Alamy
Orwell’s iconic dictator Big Brother is absurd and horrifying in equal measure (Credit: Alamy)
Then there is Orwell’s iconic dictator Big Brother: absurd and horrifying in equal measure. Orwell’s
writing is rooted in the struggles between the giant ‘-isms’ that disfigured the 20th Century. He
fought against Fascism as a volunteer in the Spanish Civil War (believing pacifism was a luxury paid
for by other people) but realised the hollow promise of Communism, when the anti-Stalinist group
he was fighting for was hunted down by the pro-Stalin faction. He witnessed first-hand the self-
deception of true believers. Today there is another set of ‘-isms’, such as nationalism and populism
who operate through the mobilisation of that most dangerous of feelings, resentment. And
everywhere you look in the contemporary world, ‘strong’ men are in positions of power. They share
the need to crush opposition, a fanatical terror of dissent and self-promotion. Big Brothers are no
longer a joke but strut the world.
Two plus two equals five

But the greatest horror in Orwell’s dystopia is the systematic stripping of meaning out of language.
The regime aims to eradicate words and the ideas and feelings they embody. Its real enemy is reality.
Tyrannies attempt to make understanding the real world impossible: seeking to replace it with
phantoms and lies. Winston Smith’s first audacious act of dissent had been to hide from the all-
seeing camera and write a diary – to compose his own account of himself and his inner world. He
knows that the acts of writing and describing mark him out for the death penalty if he is discovered.
When he is finally broken by torture he agrees that “two plus two equals five.” He had discovered
that they could indeed “get inside you”, and “Something was killed in your breast; burnt out,
cauterised out”.

Alamy The ‘Two Minutes Hate’ in 1984 could be read as anticipating the way online mobs operate
today (Credit: Alamy)Alamy
The ‘Two Minutes Hate’ in 1984 could be read as anticipating the way online mobs operate today
(Credit: Alamy)
The terror in 1984 is the annihilation of the self and the destruction of the capacity to recognise the
real world. There is no fashionable or casual relativism in Orwell’s work: he understands how hard it
is to get things right. However, this story pins down the terror of a world where people have fewer
and fewer words to use and whose thinking is distorted by ideologies.
All over the world where tyrannies rule 1984 is banned, but of course it is pirated. And sales have
surged too in countries known as stable democracies. In India and the UK, in China and Poland
people are turning to 1984. In the US, sales surged as people searched for a way of getting to grips
with the reality of the Trump administration.
Alamy Sales of 1984 have recently surged in the US, India, Britain and China (Credit: Alamy)Alamy
Sales of 1984 have recently surged in the US, India, Britain and China (Credit: Alamy)
You cannot separate Orwell’s work from the man. He is increasingly viewed as a kind of a saint ,but
how he would laugh at the statues of him that are sprouting up. His views towards feminists (though
not women), vegetarians and other groups would hardly pass the test now. But he was a man who
lived by his beliefs. He made himself genuinely poor; he fought for what he thought was right; he
was unfailingly generous and kind to other writers, and yet he taught himself to try and see the
world as it was not how he would like it to be. He was never compliant, and forensically unearthed
for our gaze the worst of himself. His aloof integrity is unique.

It is not only that we live in a world transformed by Orwell’s insights in that it shapes how we see
oppression. But 1984 is also handbook for difficult times. Knowledge is a kind of strength and we are
all being tested.
Jean Seaton is Professor of Media History at the University of Westminster and Director of the Orwell
Foundation.

BBC Culture’s Stories that shaped the world series looks at epic poems, plays and novels from around
the globe that have influenced history and changed mindsets. A poll of writers and critics, 100 stories
that shaped the world, will be announced in May.

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Live TV
We’re living ‘1984’ today
Lewis Beale, Special to CNN
4 minute read
Published 9:22 AM EDT, Sat August 3, 2013
exp newday simon police monitor license plates_00002001.jpg
Police monitor license plates
02:03 - Source: CNN
Editor’s Note: Lewis Beale writes about culture and film for the Los Angeles Times, Newsday and
other publications.

CNN
—
It appears that the police now have a device that can read license plates and check if a car is
unregistered, uninsured or stolen. We already know that the National Security Agency can dip into
your Facebook page and Google searches. And it seems that almost every store we go into these
days wants your home phone number and ZIP code as part of any transaction.

So when Edward Snowden – now cooling his heels in Russia – revealed the extent to which the NSA is
spying on Americans, collecting data on phone calls we make, it’s not as if we should have been
surprised. We live in a world that George Orwell predicted in “1984.” And that realization has caused
sales of the 1949, dystopian novel to spike dramatically upward recently – a 9,000% increase at one
point on Amazon.com.

Comparisons between Orwell’s novel about a tightly controlled totalitarian future ruled by the
ubiquitous Big Brother and today are, in fact, quite apt. Here are a few of the most obvious ones.

Lewis Beale
Lewis Beale Courtesy of Lewis Beale
Telescreens – in the novel, nearly all public and private places have large TV screens that broadcast
government propaganda, news and approved entertainment. But they are also two-way monitors
that spy on citizens’ private lives. Today websites like Facebook track our likes and dislikes, and
governments and private individuals hack into our computers and find out what they want to know.
Then there are the ever-present surveillance cameras that spy on the average person as they go
about their daily routine.

The endless war – In Orwell’s book, there’s a global war that has been going on seemingly forever,
and as the book’s hero, Winston Smith, realizes, the enemy keeps changing. One week we’re at war
with Eastasia and buddies with Eurasia. The next week, it’s just the opposite. There seems little to
distinguish the two adversaries, and they are used primarily to keep the populace of Oceania, where
Smith lives, in a constant state of fear, thereby making dissent unthinkable – or punishable. Today we
have the so-called war on terror, with no end in sight, a generalized societal fear, suspension of
certain civil liberties, and an ill-defined enemy who could be anywhere, and anything.

Doublethink – Orwell’s novel defines this as the act of accepting two mutually contradictory beliefs
as correct. It was exemplified by some of the key slogans used by the repressive government in the
book: War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength. It has also been particularly useful to
the activists who have been hard at work introducing legislation regulating abortion clinics. The claim
is that these laws are only to protect women’s health, but by forcing clinics to close because of
stringent regulations, they are effectively shutting women off not only from abortion, but other
health services.

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Newspeak – the fictional, stripped down English language, used to limit free thought. OMG, RU
serious? That’s so FUBAR. LMAO.

Memory hole – this is the machine used in the book to alter or disappear incriminating or
embarrassing documents. Paper shredders had been invented, but were hardly used when Orwell
wrote his book, and the concept of wiping out a hard drive was years in the future. But the memory
hole foretold both technologies.

Anti-Sex League – this was an organization set up to take the pleasure out of sex, and to make sure
that it was a mechanical function used for procreation only. Organizations that promote abstinence-
only sex education, or want to ban artificial birth control, are the modern versions of this.

So what’s it all mean? In 1984, Winston Smith, after an intense round of “behavior modification” –
read: torture – learns to love Big Brother, and the harsh world he was born into. Jump forward to
today, and it seems we’ve willingly given up all sorts of freedoms, and much of our right to privacy.
Fears of terrorism have a lot to do with this, but dizzying advances in technology, and the ubiquity of
social media, play a big part.

There are those who say that if you don’t have anything to hide, you have nothing to be afraid of. But
the fact is, when a government agency can monitor everyone’s phone calls, we have all become
suspects. This is one of the most frightening aspects of our modern society. And even more
frightening is the fact that we have gone so far down the road, there is probably no turning back.
Unless you spend your life in a wilderness cabin, totally off the grid, there is simply no way the
government won’t have information about you stored away somewhere.

What this means, unfortunately, is that we are all Winston Smith. And Big Brother is the modern
surveillance state.

Follow us on Twitter @CNNOpinion.

Join us on Facebook/CNNOpinion.

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Lewis Beale.

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©️2024 Cable News Network. A Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All Rights Reserved.
CNN Sans ™️& ©️2016 Cable News Network.
‘1984’ as present day
In the year 1984, however, there was much self-congratulatory coverage in the U.S. that the dystopia
of the novel had not been realized. But media studies scholar Mark Miller argued how the famous
slogan from the book, “Big Brother Is Watching You” had been turned to “Big Brother is you,
watching” television.

Miller argued that television in the United States teaches a different kind of conformity than that
portrayed in the novel. In the novel, the telescreen is used to produce conformity to the Party. In
Miller’s argument, television produces conformity to a system of rapacious consumption – through
advertising as well as a focus on the rich and famous. It also promotes endless productivity, through
messages regarding the meaning of success and the virtues of hard work.

*Julia*
Julia is a bold feminist retelling of Nineteen Eighty-Four that goes beyond Winston Smith's story to
finally reveal what life in Oceania was like for women
London, chief city of Airstrip One, the third most populous province of Oceania. It's 1984 and Julia
Worthing works as a mechanic fixing the novel-writing machines in the Fiction Department at the
Ministry of Truth. Under the ideology of IngSoc and the rule of the Party and its leader Big Brother,
Julia is a model citizen - cheerfully cynical, believing in nothing and caring not at all about politics.
She routinely breaks the rules but also collaborates with the regime whenever necessary. Everyone
likes Julia. A diligent member of the Junior Anti-Sex League (though she is secretly promiscuous) she
knows how to survive in a world of constant surveillance, Thought Police, Newspeak, Doublethink,
child spies and the black markets of the prole neighbourhoods. She's very good at staying alive.

But Julia becomes intrigued by a colleague from the Records Department - a mid-level worker of the
Outer Party called Winston Smith - when she sees him locking eyes with a superior from the Inner
Party at the Two Minutes Hate. And when one day, finding herself walking toward Winston, she
impulsively hands him a note - a potentially suicidal gesture - she comes to realise that she's losing
her grip and can no longer safely navigate her world.

Seventy-five years after Orwell finished writing his iconic novel, Sandra Newman has tackled the
world of Big Brother in a truly convincing way, offering a dramatically different, feminist narrative
that is true to and stands alongside the original. For the millions of readers who have been brought
up with Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, here, finally, is a provocative, vital and utterly satisfying
companion novel.