Keep the Aspidistra Flying

Keep the Aspidistra Flying, published in 1936, is George Orwell's third novel and his fourth book. Set in 1930s London, it is a socially critical work with a strong semi-autobiographical character. In some Spanish editions it was translated as Venciste Rosemary. The title refers to the aspidistra, a hardy houseplant that was fashionable in middle-class English homes in the Victorian era, because it tolerated dim light and the poor air produced by oil and gas lamps. Over time it became a symbol of respectability and a stock joke of the music halls. The phrase in the title is used sarcastically, as an ironic cheer for the middle class.

Orwell wrote the book in 1934 and 1935 while living at various places near Hampstead, drawing on the experiences of the preceding years: his stints as a tramp in London's poorer districts and his work in a second-hand bookshop, Booklovers' Corner, where he came to know women of his generation at close quarters. Among them was Sally Jerome, who worked for an advertising agency and partly inspired the character of Rosemary. The figure of Ravelston, a wealthy editor uneasy about his unearned income, owes much to Richard Rees, the patron who had supported Orwell at the magazine The Adelphi.

The protagonist, Gordon Comstock, is a frustrated poet and a brilliant writer of advertising slogans. He has declared a personal war on money, which he sees as a god that governs all human life. He therefore abandons a promising career in an advertising firm and takes a badly paid job in a bookshop, living in a shabby room in London. His obsession with money damages his relationships with Rosemary, with his friend Ravelston and with his family, and his pride keeps him from accepting help. The plot moves through episodes of extravagance and decline, reaching an ending in which Comstock, faced with the responsibility of a pregnancy, returns to the conventional life he had rejected.

Critical reception has been generally positive, although Orwell himself disparaged the novel, together with A Clergyman's Daughter, and asked that it not be reprinted during his lifetime. Critics have praised its vivid rendering of the anguish of poverty and the alienation of the individual in a money-driven society, as well as its portrait of Rosemary, more convincing than the women in his earlier novels. Some commentators have read it as a foreshadowing of the view of advertising and social control Orwell would develop in Nineteen Eighty-Four. A film adaptation, titled A Merry War, was released in 1997, directed by Robert Bierman and starring Richard E. Grant and Helena Bonham Carter.