Our Job Is To Make Life Worth Living

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The volume includes many unpublished letters, Warburg's report on his visit to Cranham, a clarification of Orwell's public statement on Nineteen Eighty-Four, and a detailed examination, with all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those he considered cryptos or fellow-travellers; a list of books he owned and another of his pamphlet collection; an unpublished memoir by Miranda Wood; and a note of what happened after Orwell's death on 21 January 1950.

A supplementary appendix prints a number of very important letters that came to light after the printing of this edition was completed.

Each volume has its own index but this final volume also has a very full cumulative index together with lists of topics discovered as 'As I Please' and the London Letters.