Tag Archives: tuberculosis

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The Scottish island farmhouse where George Orwell wrote 1984 (Barnhill, Jura)

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I’m following up on my blog post yesterday linking to that 2009 Daily Mail article about George Orwell’s last days.  Pictured below is the island of Jura in the Scottish Hebrides, where Orwell died shortly after completing “1984.”  Jura is situated on the remains of a 15th Century Gaelic settlement.

It’s documented that Orwell’s intermittent stays there between 1946 and 1950 were trying, as he fought to complete his world-changing novel while struggling with the tuberculosis that would kill him.  (This was the subject of the article.)

Even with this in mind, however, I swear that looks like a lovely place to write.

Barnhill_(Cnoc_an_t-Sabhail)_-_geograph.org.uk_-_451643

Photo credit: Ken Craig [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons.

Barnhill

Photo credit:  By Zilchy111 george weir (Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

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“Orwell wrote 1984 and was destroyed by the book,” by Robert Harris, the Daily Mail

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He died of tuberculosis six months later.  I think the idea that the book’s completion killed him is only surmise on the part of the author here, but it’s both sad and amazing what George Orwell accomplished despite being sick.

From the 2009 article: [“‘I began to relapse about the end of September,’ he wrote to a friend. ‘I could have done something about it then, but I had to finish that wretched book, which, thanks to illness, I had been messing about with for 18 months and which the publishers were harrying me for.”

Working on the Hebridean island of Jura in the cold and damp, the worst possible climate for tuberculosis, Orwell had produced a manuscript illegible to anyone save its author.]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1192484/60-years-Orwell-wrote-1984-destroyed-book-chilling-reminder-sinister-vision-reality.html