George Orwell is a former featured article candidate. Please view the links under Article milestones below to see why the nomination was archived. For older candidates, please check the archive.
Article milestones Date Process Result September 24, 2009 Featured article candidate Not promoted
	A fact from this article was featured on Wikipedia's Main Page in the "On this day..." column on June 25, 2022.

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Of course, this article is very interesting, but I found it a bit confusing because the writer has seemingly tried to fit every fact that he or she knows into this one Wikipedia entry, in exact chronological order. So we get a paragraph that starts out talking about Orwell's publishing activities and ends up by discussing his treatment with streptomycin. This article is MUCH longer than other Wikipedia articles about other people who are more historically significant than George Orwell, it seems to me. It strikes me that it would be a more accessible article if it were shorter and did not try to give us such a high degree of detail, such as how Orwell moved the books he dug out of the rubble of his bombed house in a wheelbarrow. That is the kind of fact I'd expect to see in a 300-page biography, not in a piece like this. George Orwell was a very interesting figure in history and literature, but the really important facts about him could be told with fewer words than this author has used, in my humble opinion. 167.102.146.2 (talk) 17:52, 4 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I agree.

I find the three sections “Life”, “Literary career and legacy”, and “Personal life” confusing as there is no actual separation of information into those categories. For example, “Life” speaks in great detail about his literary career.

Then there is the use of “Blair” to identify him with a sudden unexplained change to “Orwell”. There is also too much emotive description of his life which detracts from statements which should be factual.

Frankly, I find the article to be tedious and without a lot of discernment as to what is important enough to include and what is unnecessary in describing this man’s life and work. In my opinion, redundancy and clumsy handling of far too many details has created a sycophantic homage. MusicalDave (talk) 00:55, 18 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

This is not an uncommon malaise in Wikipedia - you get a topic that a great many people are invested in, and even more make contributions to, some of them valuable, insightful even but essentially piecemeal. You reach a point where someone (with the content knowledge) should rewrite this from scratch to impose an informative structure and craft a sequential but neutral narrative flow, moving content to footnotes to maintain that flow without losing content. That often takes collaboration, which is not encouraged in Wikipedia. Any one of us could do this but what gives us the right?Geneus01 (talk) 05:45, 18 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The structure of this article is unnecessarily complex, disjointed and difficult to navigate. Top level headers such as "Life" are pretty meaningless. In the "Personal life" section there is a subsection about his childhood, which should surely be incorporated into the "Early years" section. There is a paragraph explaining what The Orwell Society is which is irrelevant. It is difficult to gain any understanding of his two wives from this article due to its disjointed nature. The personal life section includes a lot of unnecessary trivia and should probably be removed as a separate heading and its contents trimmed down and incorporated elsewhere. The article should follow the usual biography format of placing the main events in chronological order. Fieryninja (talk) 09:33, 15 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I propose that the structure of this article could be improved with some small heading changes and restructuring, to resemble the architecture of J. R. R. Tolkien eg. Biography, Writing, Views, Legacy. Currently the "Literary career and legacy" is bloated and could be broken into the top headings "Writing" and "Legacy". The "Personal life" section is unnecessary as a top heading and has a large amount of trivia. This could be incorporated into the "Biography" section and extensively trimmed. Fieryninja (talk) 12:23, 15 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Sounds good. So why not give it a go? If you proceed in stages, explaining here exactly what you're doing, you may find there's no pushback. Rollo (talk) 15:43, 24 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Note that his remarks were from his review of Eliot's selection of RK' verse. He did not deal with his vast prose output. The article should reflect that. Liscaraig ~2025-31256-39 (talk) 15:02, 3 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

This author wanted to be known as George Orwell. I recall reading that his own wife ended up calling him both Eric and George, "interchangeably". So it seems a bit off (and perhaps also confusing) that the very first words of his profile are the name he did not want to be known by. I suggest inverting the first sentence. Rollo (talk) 16:01, 24 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

We would need a certain amount of sourcing for these points. If you are referring to his second wife, Sonia, they were only married for the last few months of his life, so this may not be decisive. PatGallacher (talk) 19:47, 24 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

I feel like uncritically accepting the Guardian article's wording of the event here is not very clear. At the very least include a quote from the primary source (the biography "Eric and Us") rather than a secondary one to let people come up with their own interpretation. A "botched seduction" sounds like he was awkward and accidentally said she was fat, not that he held her down and assaulted her as she begged for him to stop. It also presents the secondary source as the correct one while the original source and someone closer to the victim is not presented at all. ~2026-76647-1 (talk) 04:04, 4 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

A very fair point. I will go back to the primary public domain source (the postscript version of Eric & Us) and examine if there is any support or clarification on wording from Dione Venables's Diaries housed in the publicly accessible Orwell Archive at UCL. Thanks for pointing this out. Geneus01 (talk) 06:48, 4 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

I have gone back to the postscript and re-examined the Diaries at UCL and find on balance, that Kathryn Hughs’s characterisation as a “botched seduction” is a fair one, albeit reductionist and derivative (with a citation for that derivation). Neither Jacintha Buddicom, her sister Guinever nor her cousin Dione Venables characterised the “incident” as succinctly, if flawed as you describe, although not quite in the way you describe. Eric had held her down and Jacintha had screamed at him to stop and he had (stopped). Your suggestion that he “assaulted her as she begged for him to stop” is your characterisation.

I am grateful for your challenge as it encouraged me to go back to source, where I saw something quite significant in the Diaries I had never spotted before. Geneus01 (talk) 06:18, 6 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]