Orwell
Orwell first met her when she worked as an assistant for Cyril Connolly, a friend of his from Eton College, at the literary magazine Horizon. After the death of his first wife Eileen O'Shaughnessy, Orwell became desperately lonely, and on 13 October 1949 married Brownell, three months before his death from tuberculosis.
Although in later life Brownell often went by the name Sonia Orwell, this was never legally her name as 'Orwell' was merely a pen name that her husband (real name Eric Arthur Blair) had chosen. Some commentators have argued that she helped Orwell through the painful last months of his life and, according to Anthony Powell, apparently cheered Orwell up in his last three months. Others saw her as a mercenary who was only interested in becoming his literary widow. T.R Fyvel, who was a colleague and friend of George Orwell during the last decade of the writer's life believed Sonia was a partial model for the figure of Julia in Nineteen Eighty-Four, the woman who brings love and warmth to the middle-aged Orwellian hero, Winston Smith.
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