Like Plato, Niccolo Machiavelli, and Franz Kafka, George Orwell is a writer so well known that he has become an eponym. Yet the sinister connotations of “Orwellian” are at odds with the admiration and affection that Orwell himself, the champion of clear writing and honest thinking, continues to enjoy across a wide spectrum of readers. The British historian Geoffrey Wheatcroft voiced a general sentiment when he wrote, “The secular saint of our time par excellence was George Orwell.”
Orwell expressed his own credo when, in an essay on Charles Dickens, he wrote, “if men would behave decendy the world would, Funder uses Orwell's first wife, Eileen O'Shaughnessy, as a case study in patriarchal exploitation.