During the early and mid-1930s, Orwell dabbled in teaching while trying to sustain himself as a writer. His novels Burmese Days (1934), A Clergyman’s Daughter (1935), and Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936) all met with decent reviews but modest sales. In 1936, Orwell employed the same method he had used to write Down and Out and visited Wigan, a mining town in Northern England, to see how the miners and their families lived. The result was The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), a non-fictional account of the miners’ struggles that was chosen by the Left Book Club and sold over 44,000 copies. Orwell was now regarded as an important political writer, much more so than as a novelist. This same year also saw Orwell become a husband: On June 9, 1936, he married Eileen O’Shaughnessy.
Orwell and his new wife did not begin a peaceful married life; rather, they both traveled to Spain to serve in the fight against fascism which would become the Spanish Civil War. Orwell left England in December of 1936 and served in the P. O. U. M. (The Worker’s Party of Marxist Unification) — a socialist party allied with England’s Independent Labour Party (I. L. P.). Orwell was responsible for training a band of Catalonian soldiers fighting General Franco on the Aragon front. Eileen arrived in Barcelona in February of 1937 to serve as a typist for the I. L. P.’s Spanish offices. That May, Orwell was hit by a sniper in the throat but miraculously lived and only lost the use of his voice for a few weeks. Eventually, the P. O. U. M. was outlawed by the more powerful communist forces that arose as a result of the conflict, and Orwell escaped (with Eileen) to France after serving more than three months in combat. Homage to Catalonia (1938), another non-fiction work, describes Orwell’s time on the front and his disillusionment with the very revolution he thought would win freedom for Spain. This idea of a revolution betraying its supposed aims is a chief issue of Animal Farm.
