While we can all agree on that, I think, I do not believe that scrutinizing the Venables postscript amounts to mere “quibbling over style.” I happen to believe that the scenario Hunt outlines seems convincing. However, the press coverage of the incident based on the postscript treated it as “attempted rape” because that, in essence, is what Venables describes, regardless of whether that’s what she intended.

I look forward to seeing the results of Professor Hunt’s research.

I am currently working on a study of the youth of Eric Blair, and I have become convinced that Dione Venables is absolutely right: Jacintha Buddicom was very important to the future George Orwell, and their relationship played a key role in his emotional and intellectual maturation.

Mrs. Venables has allowed me to examine a number of documents in her possession which she did not mention in the Postscript. These sources, combined with oblique references in Orwell’s own writings, suggest that neither Jacintha nor Orwell were entirely honest, in print, about their experiences together.

Here I have neither time nor space to present the evidence. But briefly, this is what seems to have happened. Eric and Jacintha were were much more erotically involved than Jacintha Buddicom could later admit. In September 1921 Eric tried to force the sexual issue, as frustrated young males will do, no doubt in the belief that Jacintha “really wanted it,” and would yield to a determined display of masculine vigor. When her resistance finally convinced him that “no” really did mean “no” he gave it up. In other words, he abandoned the “attempted rape” once he realized that rape was what it in fact would be.

The evidence suggests that Jacintha forgave him, but that he never quite forgave himself, with lasting consequences for the character and work of “George Orwell”. I hope soon to be able to explain all this in more substantive and persuasive detail. In the meantime, let us disagree, if we must, without being disagreeable.

William Hunt, Professor of History, St. Lawrence University, Canton, New York 13617

Press reports did prompt me to look into the matter. Gordon Bowker, writing in the Times Literary Supplement (February 23, 2007) about Venables’s postscript to Eric & Us, says Blair “attempted to rape” Jacintha Buddicom and refers to the incident as “near-rape.” Frank Kermode in The New York Review of Books (June 14, 2007) states that Blair “tried to rape her.”

However, Venables cannot blame regrettable tendencies of newspapers for a suggestion she made. In response to my essay she says, “That the word ‘rape’ was ever introduced at all is regrettable (and I see that I wrote the dreaded word [p.182 para 2]). It did not, however, actually happen, nor was there any suggestion that it had.” However, in her postscript, she writes that Guinever (Guiny) Buddicom, Jacintha’s sister, “had discovered a furious letter from Jacintha to Eric, telling him of her disgust and shock that he should try and FORCE her to let him make love to her” (emphasis in original). Venables writes that Blair attempted to “make SERIOUS love to Jacintha” by holding her down and that in the ensuing struggle, Jacintha suffered a bruised hip and shoulder. Stating that someone tried physically to force another to have sex does indeed suggest an attempt at rape. Venables knows this; in the paragraph of her text that she cites, she reports asking Guinever whether Blair “had raped” Jacintha. She says Guinever told her that “there was a reference to Jacintha screaming at Eric to stop – and he had.” Still, Venables gives the impression that he tried to rape her but then relented. “Guiny said that she had a hazy memory of Jacintha rushing in with a torn skirt and a tear-stained face like thunder.” In my essay, I accurately summarize the postscript’s account when I relate that it says Blair “stopped somewhere short of committing rape.”

I also state that the postscript has “serious shortcomings,” which, in case any readers desire more explanation, I describe some of them at greater length here. The story of the aborted assault comes from Venables’s reconstruction of a discussion with a person who combines her “hazy” memories with her recitation of what she found in a letter that she burned. Even if Venables immediately wrote down what Guinever Buddicom said to her in 1993, when she revealed the contents of her sister’s draft letter, this is several steps removed from an eyewitness account. The conversation between Venables and Guinever occurred 72 years after the alleged incident (and then Venables kept her version of it to herself for another 13 years). Crucially, the letter does not survive, so she cannot quote from it. The individual who relayed its contents to Venables died in 2003, so she cannot be interviewed. Venables is vague about how much of the account was taken from the letter and how much came from its burner’s memories of 1921. What we get, essentially, is what she said she said she said…

On top of the temporal distance and the lack of extant primary source material, there are strange comments and qualities in the postscript that call its reliability into question. Venables starts, not with the accusation (or, at least, suggestion) of attempted rape but instead by saying Eric and Jacintha “loved nothing better than being devious, mysterious with each other” and that Eric & Us was written in that spirit, with Buddicom possibly “straying from the truth” as well as being evasive. Thus, as Venables leaves things, readers are not always to take Buddicom at her word but future biographers should consider a third-hand account of one her destroyed letter drafts. She simultaneously undermines her relative’s trustworthiness and presents a supplement that assumes the Buddicom sisters can be believed.

In addition to the impossibility of verification, there are other problems as well. Ironically enough, given Orwell’s famously clean prose style, some of these have to do with her at-times less than window-pane clear prose. Others involve contradictions and peculiar suppositions. In her description of Blair’s pounce, she makes a point of mentioning the discrepancy in size between the two friends, giving his height as six feet four inches and Buddicom’s as “under” five feet (despite Buddicom’s own report of her height in Eric & Us as slightly above five feet as of 1919). Venables seems to want to stress that the eighteen year old Blair was significantly bigger and, presumably, stronger than the twenty year old Buddicom. However, one paragraph on she writes of Buddicom: “She may well have recognized at last that the two-year gap in their ages was now like a five-year gap in physical maturity – and she was not prepared for anyone to force himself on her – even Eric.” Is she implying that the reason Blair did not follow through with his attempt to rape her is because Buddicom was able to overpower him? Then what was she trying to prove with the size difference? (Orwell’s size is uncertain in Bowker’s biography. In one place he makes the author an inch shorter than what Venables records. However, once Orwell gets to Spain, Bowker sees him standing that extra inch taller.) It is not evident what Venables want to convey here (just as it is uncertain what “like thunder” describes in the line quoted above. Is it Buddicom’s face, or is it her rushing in?). This weakness can be seen yet again in her response to my essay when she says there was no suggestion of rape even though she acknowledges that she did in fact use that very word.

Then there are the flat-out odd remarks in the postscript, like this one about Buddicom’s supposed reaction to Blair’s pounce. “She must have realized that Eric was not entirely to blame over this incident because she had not stopped his adolescent romancing earlier” – romancing Buddicom denied ever occurred, by the way. So she encouraged him, Venables implies, but he stopped somewhere short of rape either because she told him to or because she prevailed in their tussle.

Venables’s speculation that Blair imagined Buddicom while having sex with Burmese prostitutes is also, frankly, weird. She writes: “One cannot help wondering whether, losing his virginity to a stream of uncomplaining little Burmese girls, he was seeing the petite Jacintha in their very similar sized bodies.” Ignoring the question of her sources regarding the physiques and personalities of any prostitutes Blair may have hired (and D.J. Taylor admits that very little is known about this), one really cannot help but wonder how a person loses his virginity to a “stream” of people. Wouldn’t it have been gone after just one?

Commenting on my essay, Venables expresses satisfaction with Bowker’s term “pounce” in describing Orwell’s sexual maneuverings. However, Bowker essentially uses it as a synonym of “attempted rape,” which may be why he so readily accepts Venables’s account and accurately views it as describing attempted rape. He also assumes Orwell pounced on women even when he has no evidence. Regarding a mid-1940s meeting between Orwell and Sonia Brownell, for instance, Bowker writes: “Whether he pounced or simply propositioned her is not known.” In a troublesome fashion, he relies on passages from the novels to support his speculations about what he believes Orwell actually did.

As to the claim that I treat the friendship between Jacintha and Blair as a “passing” or “casual” one, I can only say I do not know what passages she has in mind. I write that Jacintha and he had “shared experiences” in the 1920s and that she recalled them “with pleasure.” Beyond that, I do not comment on the content, quality or length of their relationship. I do not doubt that the two were close friends, and never said that I did.

I also do not know what to make of her comment about the looking “through more than just his two most popular novels.” In fact, I quote other works of his in the essay.

I do not doubt that revealing information about Orwell’s life could emerge. I simply did not find any in the 2006 postscript to Eric & Us or in the careless press reports about it.