History & Criticism
![Rebecca Solnit - [object Object] author](https://res.cloudinary.com/readsomnia/image/upload/authors/a_B001IODD3I.jpg)
Orwell's Roses
Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction
Finalist for the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography
"An exhilarating romp through Orwell's life and times and also through the life and times of roses." -Margaret Atwood
"A captivating account of Orwell as gardener, lover, parent, and endlessly curious thinker." -Claire Messud, Harper's
"Nobody who reads it will ever think of Nineteen Eighty-Four in quite the same way." -Vogue
A lush exploration of politics, roses, and pleasure, and a fresh take on George Orwell as an avid gardener whose political writing was grounded by his passion for the natural world
"In the spring of 1936, a writer planted roses." So be-gins Rebecca Solnit's new book, a reflection on George Orwell's passionate gardening and the way that his involvement with plants, particularly flowers, illuminates his other commitments as a writer and antifascist, and on the intertwined politics of nature and power.
Sparked by her unexpected encounter with the roses he reportedly planted in 1936, Solnit's account of this overlooked aspect of Orwell's life journeys through his writing and his actions-from going deep into the coal mines of England, fighting in the Spanish Civil War, critiquing Stalin when much of the international left still supported him (and then critiquing that left) to his analysis of the relationship between lies and authoritarianism.
Through Solnit's celebrated ability to draw unexpected connections, readers are drawn onward from Orwell‘s own work as a writer and gardener to encounter photographer Tina Modotti's roses and her politics, agriculture and illusion in the USSR of his time with forcing lemons to grow in impossibly cold conditions, Orwell's slave-owning ancestors in Jamaica, Jamaica Kincaid's examination of colonialism and imperialism in the flower garden, and the brutal rose industry in Colombia that supplies the American market. The book draws to a close with a rereading of Nineteen Eighty-Four that completes Solnit's portrait of a more hopeful Orwell, as well as offering a meditation on pleasure, beauty, and joy as acts of resistance.
Finalist for the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography
"An exhilarating romp through Orwell's life and times and also through the life and times of roses." -Margaret Atwood
"A captivating account of Orwell as gardener, lover, parent, and endlessly curious thinker." -Claire Messud, Harper's
"Nobody who reads it will ever think of Nineteen Eighty-Four in quite the same way." -Vogue
A lush exploration of politics, roses, and pleasure, and a fresh take on George Orwell as an avid gardener whose political writing was grounded by his passion for the natural world
"In the spring of 1936, a writer planted roses." So be-gins Rebecca Solnit's new book, a reflection on George Orwell's passionate gardening and the way that his involvement with plants, particularly flowers, illuminates his other commitments as a writer and antifascist, and on the intertwined politics of nature and power.
Sparked by her unexpected encounter with the roses he reportedly planted in 1936, Solnit's account of this overlooked aspect of Orwell's life journeys through his writing and his actions-from going deep into the coal mines of England, fighting in the Spanish Civil War, critiquing Stalin when much of the international left still supported him (and then critiquing that left) to his analysis of the relationship between lies and authoritarianism.
Through Solnit's celebrated ability to draw unexpected connections, readers are drawn onward from Orwell‘s own work as a writer and gardener to encounter photographer Tina Modotti's roses and her politics, agriculture and illusion in the USSR of his time with forcing lemons to grow in impossibly cold conditions, Orwell's slave-owning ancestors in Jamaica, Jamaica Kincaid's examination of colonialism and imperialism in the flower garden, and the brutal rose industry in Colombia that supplies the American market. The book draws to a close with a rereading of Nineteen Eighty-Four that completes Solnit's portrait of a more hopeful Orwell, as well as offering a meditation on pleasure, beauty, and joy as acts of resistance.
Editorial Reviews
NAMED A "MUST-READ" BOOK OF 2021 BY TIME
"I loved this book, and so will many. . . [Orwell] is re-envisioned as a joyous, hopeful, life-loving, toad-appreciating, baby-cherishing dad, but especially as an avid and energetic gardener . . . an exhilarating romp through Orwell's life and times and also through the life and times of roses."
-Margaret Atwood
"[A] tribute by one fine essayist of the political left to another of an earlier generation . . . the great pleasure of reading [Solnit] is spending time with her mind, its digressions and juxtapositions, its unexpected connections . . . a captivating account of Orwell as gardener, lover, parent, and endlessly curious thinker . . . movingly, [Solnit] takes the time to find the traces of Orwell the gardener and lover of beauty in his pollical novels, and in his insistence on the value and pleasure of things."
-Claire Messud, Harper's Magazine
"[A] wide-ranging yet disciplined sequence of essays on the importance of joy in Orwell's concept of freedom . . . Solnit seeks to show us that Orwell was [...] capable of taking great joy in small things . . . and such pleasure was intrinsic to his political vision . . . like Orwell as essayist, Solnit deploys the full human instrument in service of her curiosity . . . She just creates a frame large enough to contain both revolutionary brilliance and unwitting reactionary associations in the same person-large enough to contain life's contradictions in a way that only the essay, that humble literary mouthpiece, can."
-The New York Times Book Review
"[A] far-reaching meditation on Orwell's life and on the cultural significance of roses . . . Most affecting is the surprising hopefulness implicit in a political writer's passion for nature: ‘Orwell did not believe in permanent happiness or the politics that tried to realize it, but he did believe devoutly in moments of delight, even rapture.'"
-The New Yorker
"Expansive and thought-provoking . . . in the hands of a skilled novelist or essayist like Solnit [...] a biography becomes something else entirely. It begins in the middle. It skips the boring bits. It possesses a voice, and a point of view. It is unapologetically incomplete, and trusts the readers to go elsewhere to find out whatever else they might like to know . . .
"I loved this book, and so will many. . . [Orwell] is re-envisioned as a joyous, hopeful, life-loving, toad-appreciating, baby-cherishing dad, but especially as an avid and energetic gardener . . . an exhilarating romp through Orwell's life and times and also through the life and times of roses."
-Margaret Atwood
"[A] tribute by one fine essayist of the political left to another of an earlier generation . . . the great pleasure of reading [Solnit] is spending time with her mind, its digressions and juxtapositions, its unexpected connections . . . a captivating account of Orwell as gardener, lover, parent, and endlessly curious thinker . . . movingly, [Solnit] takes the time to find the traces of Orwell the gardener and lover of beauty in his pollical novels, and in his insistence on the value and pleasure of things."
-Claire Messud, Harper's Magazine
"[A] wide-ranging yet disciplined sequence of essays on the importance of joy in Orwell's concept of freedom . . . Solnit seeks to show us that Orwell was [...] capable of taking great joy in small things . . . and such pleasure was intrinsic to his political vision . . . like Orwell as essayist, Solnit deploys the full human instrument in service of her curiosity . . . She just creates a frame large enough to contain both revolutionary brilliance and unwitting reactionary associations in the same person-large enough to contain life's contradictions in a way that only the essay, that humble literary mouthpiece, can."
-The New York Times Book Review
"[A] far-reaching meditation on Orwell's life and on the cultural significance of roses . . . Most affecting is the surprising hopefulness implicit in a political writer's passion for nature: ‘Orwell did not believe in permanent happiness or the politics that tried to realize it, but he did believe devoutly in moments of delight, even rapture.'"
-The New Yorker
"Expansive and thought-provoking . . . in the hands of a skilled novelist or essayist like Solnit [...] a biography becomes something else entirely. It begins in the middle. It skips the boring bits. It possesses a voice, and a point of view. It is unapologetically incomplete, and trusts the readers to go elsewhere to find out whatever else they might like to know . . .
Readers Top Reviews
Kindle MariaMicColi
Rebecca Solnit did a very in-depth look into Orwell's life including his wartime and peace time work. He was a prolific writer and very political for the times. Even though health was horrible all of his life, he continued to push forward and married again late before he died.
I loved this book. Interpretation is a political act, and Orwell has been so widely interpreted his name is a synonym for “hypocritical soulless language” and this is a book about injecting soul and joy into an understanding of his life and what he cared about. Happy I read this book on a whim, it blew me away.
Christian SchlectSus
I bought this book because of George Orwell. What I got was half Orwell and half its author, Rebeca Solnit. The material analyzing the life and works of Orwell was interesting; the material on the heart-felt social causes that continually press down on Ms. Solinit were often less so. She is concerned over capitalism, Big Tech, climate change, sexism, labor rights, and so forth. Needless to say, Ms. Solnit abhors the politics of Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and "the age of Trump." She echoes Orwell's cry for truth and applauds his writings attacking the brutal and de-humanizing totalitarianism of Stalin. However, I can't help but think if Ms. Solnit had been dropped into the Soviet Union in 1925 she would have been of the the type to have sent many a soul to Siberia. Overall Ms. Solnit's writing skills are excellent. But since in this book she also comments on the use of language, I will point out one thing that irritates me as a general reader. This is the overuse of the word "literally." Almost always it is unnecessary. I think it is used by many authors to show readers they are smart and only use it in the correct sense. Here over five times in this book are sentences such as "Perhaps Blair had something to do with commissioning this painting that portrays him on quite literally equal footing with .." and "Enslaved Africans were the majority population in Jamaica and the white minority kept them in in thrall through punitive cruelty and quite literally worked them to death..." Quite literally.
J. S. bartley
As my friends in my ethics book club all know, Solnit is my favorite writer the last few years. If she writes it, whether it’s a book or an essay, I’m going to read it. Her writing is beautiful, she has a great insight to life and I always learn something from her. Solnit touches upon many current subjects even though she features Orwell from the forties. As always, her writing is beautiful as well as poignant.
Short Excerpt Teaser
One
Day of the Dead
In the spring of 1936, a writer planted roses. I had known this formore than three decades and never thought enough about whatthat meant until a November day a few years ago, when I was underdoctor's orders to recuperate at home in San Francisco and was alsoon a train from London to Cambridge to talk with another writerabout a book I'd written. It was November 2, and where I'm fromthat's celebrated as Día de Los Muertos, the Day of the Dead. Backhome, my neighbors had built altars to those who had died in the pastyear, decorated with candles, food, marigolds, photographs of andletters to those they'd lost, and in the evening people were going topromenade and fill the streets to pay their respects at the open-airaltars and eat pan de muerto, bread of the dead, some of their facespainted to look like skulls adorned with flowers in that Mexican traditionthat finds life in death and death in life. In a lot of Catholicplaces, it's a day to visit cemeteries, clean family graves, and adornthem with flowers. Like the older versions of Halloween, it's a timewhen the borders between life and death become porous.
But I was on a morning train rolling north from King's Cross inLondon, gazing out the window as London's density dissipated intolower and lower buildings spread farther and farther apart. And then the train was rolling through farmland, with grazing sheep and cowsand wheat fields and clusters of bare trees, beautiful even under a wintrywhite sky. I had an errand or perhaps a quest to carry out. I waslooking for some trees-perhapsa Cox's orange pippin apple tree andsome other fruit trees-for Sam Green, who's a documentary filmmakerand one of my closest friends. He and I had been talking abouttrees, and more often emailing about them, for several years. Weshared a love for them and the sense that someday he might be makinga documentary about them, or we might join forces to make somekind of art about them.
Sam had found solace and joy in trees in the hard year after hisyounger brother died in 2009, and I think we both loved the sense ofsteadfast continuity a tree can represent. I had grown up in a rollingCalifornia landscape studded with several kinds of oak trees alongwith bays and buckeyes. Many individual trees that I knew as a childare still recognizable when I return, so little changed when I havechanged so much. At the other end of the county was Muir Woods,the famous redwood forest of old-growthtrees left uncut when therest of the area was logged, trees a couple hundred feet tall with needlesthat condense moisture out of the air on foggy days and drip itonto the soil as a sort of summer rain that only falls under the canopyand not in the open air.
Slices of redwood trees a dozen or more feet across, with their annualrings used as history charts, were popular in my youth, and thearrival of Columbus in the Americas or the signing of the Magna Cartaand sometimes the birth and death of Jesus would be marked on thehuge disks in museums and parks. The oldest redwood in Muir Woodsis 1,200 years old, so more than half its time on Earth had passed before the first Europeans showed up in what they would name California. Atree planted tomorrow that lived as long would be standing in thethirty-thirdcentury ad, and it would be short-livedcompared to thebristlecones a few hundred miles east, which can live five thousandyears. Trees are an invitation to think about time and to travel in it theway they do, by standing still and reaching out and down.
If war has an opposite, gardens might sometimes be it, and peoplehave found a particular kind of peace in forests, meadows, parks, andgardens. The surrealist artist Man Ray fled Europe and Nazis in 1940and spent the next decade in California. During the Second WorldWar, he visited the sequoia groves in the Sierra Nevada and wrote ofthese trees that are broader than redwoods, but not quite as tall: "Theirsilence is more eloquent than the roaring torrents and Niagaras, thanthe reverberating thunder in [the] Grand Canyon, than the burstingof bombs; and is without menace. The gossiping leaves of the sequoias,one hundred yards above one's head, are too far away to be heard. Irecalled a stroll in the Luxembourg Gardens during the first monthsof the outbreak of war, stopping under an old chestnut tree that hadprobably survived the French Revolution, a mere pygmy, wishing Icould be transformed into a tree until peace came again."
That summer before my trip to England, when Sam was in town,we had gone to admire the trees planted in San Francisco by MaryEllen Pleasant, a Black woman born in slavery around 1812, who hadbecome a heroine of the Underground Railroad and a civil rights activist,as well as a player in the elite money politics of...
Day of the Dead
In the spring of 1936, a writer planted roses. I had known this formore than three decades and never thought enough about whatthat meant until a November day a few years ago, when I was underdoctor's orders to recuperate at home in San Francisco and was alsoon a train from London to Cambridge to talk with another writerabout a book I'd written. It was November 2, and where I'm fromthat's celebrated as Día de Los Muertos, the Day of the Dead. Backhome, my neighbors had built altars to those who had died in the pastyear, decorated with candles, food, marigolds, photographs of andletters to those they'd lost, and in the evening people were going topromenade and fill the streets to pay their respects at the open-airaltars and eat pan de muerto, bread of the dead, some of their facespainted to look like skulls adorned with flowers in that Mexican traditionthat finds life in death and death in life. In a lot of Catholicplaces, it's a day to visit cemeteries, clean family graves, and adornthem with flowers. Like the older versions of Halloween, it's a timewhen the borders between life and death become porous.
But I was on a morning train rolling north from King's Cross inLondon, gazing out the window as London's density dissipated intolower and lower buildings spread farther and farther apart. And then the train was rolling through farmland, with grazing sheep and cowsand wheat fields and clusters of bare trees, beautiful even under a wintrywhite sky. I had an errand or perhaps a quest to carry out. I waslooking for some trees-perhapsa Cox's orange pippin apple tree andsome other fruit trees-for Sam Green, who's a documentary filmmakerand one of my closest friends. He and I had been talking abouttrees, and more often emailing about them, for several years. Weshared a love for them and the sense that someday he might be makinga documentary about them, or we might join forces to make somekind of art about them.
Sam had found solace and joy in trees in the hard year after hisyounger brother died in 2009, and I think we both loved the sense ofsteadfast continuity a tree can represent. I had grown up in a rollingCalifornia landscape studded with several kinds of oak trees alongwith bays and buckeyes. Many individual trees that I knew as a childare still recognizable when I return, so little changed when I havechanged so much. At the other end of the county was Muir Woods,the famous redwood forest of old-growthtrees left uncut when therest of the area was logged, trees a couple hundred feet tall with needlesthat condense moisture out of the air on foggy days and drip itonto the soil as a sort of summer rain that only falls under the canopyand not in the open air.
Slices of redwood trees a dozen or more feet across, with their annualrings used as history charts, were popular in my youth, and thearrival of Columbus in the Americas or the signing of the Magna Cartaand sometimes the birth and death of Jesus would be marked on thehuge disks in museums and parks. The oldest redwood in Muir Woodsis 1,200 years old, so more than half its time on Earth had passed before the first Europeans showed up in what they would name California. Atree planted tomorrow that lived as long would be standing in thethirty-thirdcentury ad, and it would be short-livedcompared to thebristlecones a few hundred miles east, which can live five thousandyears. Trees are an invitation to think about time and to travel in it theway they do, by standing still and reaching out and down.
If war has an opposite, gardens might sometimes be it, and peoplehave found a particular kind of peace in forests, meadows, parks, andgardens. The surrealist artist Man Ray fled Europe and Nazis in 1940and spent the next decade in California. During the Second WorldWar, he visited the sequoia groves in the Sierra Nevada and wrote ofthese trees that are broader than redwoods, but not quite as tall: "Theirsilence is more eloquent than the roaring torrents and Niagaras, thanthe reverberating thunder in [the] Grand Canyon, than the burstingof bombs; and is without menace. The gossiping leaves of the sequoias,one hundred yards above one's head, are too far away to be heard. Irecalled a stroll in the Luxembourg Gardens during the first monthsof the outbreak of war, stopping under an old chestnut tree that hadprobably survived the French Revolution, a mere pygmy, wishing Icould be transformed into a tree until peace came again."
That summer before my trip to England, when Sam was in town,we had gone to admire the trees planted in San Francisco by MaryEllen Pleasant, a Black woman born in slavery around 1812, who hadbecome a heroine of the Underground Railroad and a civil rights activist,as well as a player in the elite money politics of...
