Coming Up For Air - Background

Background

As a child, Orwell lived at Shiplake and Henley in the Thames Valley. He was the son of an Indian Civil Servant who was still in India, and he lived a genteel life with his mother and two sisters, though spending much of the year at boarding school at Eastbourne and later at Eton. He particularly enjoyed fishing and shooting rabbits with a neighbouring family.

In 1937 Orwell spent some months fighting in the Spanish Civil War. He was wounded in the throat in May 1937, by a Fascist sniper at Huesca.

Orwell was severely ill in 1938 and was advised to spend the winter in a warm climate. The novelist L.H.Myers anonymously gave £300 to enable this and Orwell went with his wife to North Africa where he stayed, in French Morocco, mainly in Marrakesh, from September 1938 to March 1939. (Orwell never learned the source of the money and he accepted it only on condition that it be considered a loan. He repaid the loan, eight years later, when he began making money from the success of Animal Farm.) Orwell wrote Coming Up for Air while he was in North Africa and left the manuscript at his agent's office within a few hours of arriving back in England on 30 March 1939. It was submitted to Victor Gollancz, who had an option on Orwell's next three novels, in spite of the 'cold treatment which had been given when Homage to Catalonia was rejected.' In fact Orwell heard in April 1939 that Gollancz had reservations about the book, and was delaying a decision to accept it. The descriptions in the novel of a character who lectures at a meeting of Gollancz's Left Book Club, and of the meeting itself, were such that Gollancz 'could not have helped being offended by them.' Nevertheless, the publisher did bring out the novel without demanding major changes and it was published on 12 June 1939. It was the last Orwell novel to bear the Gollancz imprint.