Keep the Aspidistra Flying

First published in 1936, George Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying is a sharp, darkly comic novel about money, social respectability and the difficulty of living according to one’s principles in a society governed by financial security. Its protagonist, Gordon Comstock, is a struggling poet who rejects the middle-class world of advertising and commercial ambition, abandoning a respectable job in favour of poorly paid work in a bookshop. Determined to resist what he sees as the tyranny of money, Gordon embraces poverty as a form of rebellion, only to discover that his ideals are increasingly compromised by hunger, humiliation and the strain placed on his relationship with Rosemary, a woman who offers him affection and a possible future. As his circumstances deteriorate, his resistance to material comfort becomes entangled with pride, resentment and a growing inability to distinguish independence from self-destruction.

Among Orwell’s most personal early novels, Keep the Aspidistra Flying draws on his own experiences of precarious literary life and his ambivalent relationship with the English middle class. The aspidistra, a hardy houseplant associated with respectable suburban interiors, becomes a potent symbol of the security and conventionality Gordon despises but cannot entirely escape. Orwell combines social observation with psychological comedy, exposing the contradictions of a man who longs to reject bourgeois values while remaining painfully conscious of status, success and other people’s judgement. Beneath the satire lies a serious question about the relationship between artistic freedom and economic necessity: how much can a person sacrifice in the name of principle before the sacrifice itself becomes another form of vanity? Less widely read than Animal Farm or Nineteen Eighty-Four, the novel nevertheless offers a revealing portrait of Orwell’s developing political and moral imagination, as well as an enduring account of the struggle to live honestly within an imperfect world.