The estate of British author George Orwell has approved a new version of his classic dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four written from a feminist perspective, with Winston’s lover, Julia, as protagonist, The Guardian reports.
Set in an invasive totalitarian state, Nineteen Eighty-Four tells the story of Winston Smith, a worker in The Ministry of Truth, which in its very Trumpian manner rewrites history to match the narrative of Big Brother, the supreme power in Oceania.
“[I]n some ways she was far more acute than Winston, and far less susceptible to Party propaganda … She also stirred a sort of envy in him by telling him that during the Two Minutes Hate her great difficulty was to avoid bursting out laughing,” Orwell writes describing Julia in the novel. “But she only questioned the teachings of the Party when they in some way touched upon her own life. Often she was ready to accept the official mythology, simply because the difference between truth and falsehood did not seem important to her.”
American author Sandra Newman, an acclaimed 56-year-old fiction writer from Boston, has been selected to pen the new edition. Newman will relate the events of the novel through Julia’s eyes.
“It was the man from Records who began it, him all unknowing in his prim, grim way, his above-it-all oldthink way. He was the one Syme called ‘Old Misery’,” writes Newman in excerpts released by the publisher. “Comrade Smith was his right name, though ‘Comrade’ never suited him somehow. Of course, if you felt foolish calling someone ‘Comrade’, far better not to speak to them at all.”