Rescuing Orwell's 'bad fairy'

It ain't easy, being a famous writer's relict. If male (Ted Hughes, Leonard Woolf), you tend to be accused of having driven your wife into the grave; if female (Valerie Eliot, Sonia Orwell), your fate is to be characterised by your husband's biographers as grasping, obstructive and no match, intellectually, for the defunct genius. Either way, you get to take on the role of bad fairy.

It is partly to rescue Sonia Orwell from this destiny that Hilary Spurling has written The Girl from the Fiction Department, a memoir of the woman who was her friend, and whose real character she felt was in danger of being absorbed by "the myth of the cold and grasping Widow Orwell".

Sonia was born in 1918, in India. Her father, Charles Brownell, a Calcutta freight-broker, died suddenly when she was only four months old, amid rumours of suicide. At six, Sonia went as a boarder to the Convent of the Sacred Heart, Roehampton. As an adult, she used to spit whenever she saw a nun.

A post-school year in Neuchatel also marked her indelibly. On a boating excursion with three friends, the boat capsized and the other members of the party drowned - the last of them attempting to drag her down with him.

Unable to settle with her family after this, Sonia moved to a furnished room on the borders of Fitzrovia, then a raffish haunt of writers and artists, and began what was to be her life's work, of nourishing the creativity of others.

Her first opportunities to do this came as a muse to the Euston Road School of artists. From there, she entered the orbit of Horizon, a magazine which, launched in 1940 under the editorship of Cyril Connolly, Peter Watson and Stephen Spender, became a crucible for ideas about art and literature. She rapidly became an indispensable member of the staff.

The myth, or one of the myths, of Sonia began to grow around her.

The intellectual stimulus and friendships offered by Horizon might have been a route into the most fulfilled of lives, had it not been for her extraordinary ability to pluck misery from the jaws of contentment. After the end of an affair with the French philosopher, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the love of her life, she married the dying George Orwell, who had already proposed to three or four girls, including, on a previous occasion, Sonia herself. "Her marrying Orwell had to do with her own deep unhappiness," wrote her friend, and co-editor with her of Orwell's papers, Ian Angus.

When Orwell died, months after the wedding, Sonia was distraught. Spurling argues that the charge he laid upon her, of safeguarding his oeuvre, was to be the death of her.

Always tinged with despair (her friend Marguerite Duras portrayed her in a novel as an enigmatic figure, perpetually sipping a bitter, blood-red glass of Campari), her life seems to have followed a melancholy trajectory after Orwell's death. She married again, to Michael Pitt-Rivers who, with Lord Montaguof Beaulieu and Peter Wildeblood had been convicted of homosexual activity with airmen in the pleasure gardens known as the Larmer Grounds.

Spurling records without comment the fact that the wedding party was held in the Larmer Grounds. "That marriage won't last," said Sonia's friend, Ivy Compton-Burnett. It didn't.