"Beautiful, intelligent, and idealistic, Sonia was the model for Julia, heroine of Orwell's 1984. Her friends and admirers included W. H. Auden, Lucian Freud and Frances Bacon. She was Cyril Connolly's indispensable assistant at the influential literary magazine Horizon during the 1940s, and in the 1960s she co-edited the ground-breaking four-volume collection of Orwell's nonfiction writings." But after the failure of her second marriage, Sonia's life began to go wrong, ending in penury and despair due to the burden unwittingly placed on her by George Orwell at his death. Some have since seen her as a mythical heroine; others have depicted her as mean and mercenary. Spurling portrays the real Sonia Orwell in all her generous, spirited, ferocious, and self-doubting complexity.

The New York Times
In the gentlest of resurrections, Sonia Orwell comes off as a desperate heroine cooked up by Jean Rhys and Edith Wharton on a rainy afternoon. If she fails to rise to the green velvet heights that Spurling sets for her, she remains formidable, more than a tad tortured, a woman of fierce devotions and equally fierce aversions, no less interesting for being, as one friend noted, ''unspeakably unhappy.'' She paid dearly for what she loved most, which is one definition of nobility. On all counts, the best epitaph for her may be that uttered by a Marguerite Duras character, closely modeled on Sonia: ''Literature can be as fatal as anything else; you can't get over it.'' Stacy Schiff

The Washington Post
Praising The Girl from the Fiction Department is easy. The hard part is figuring out what to praise first about this concise biography of the vivacious woman who married the author of 1984 on his deathbed, yet who was far more than just the Widow Orwell. Michael Dirda

Publisher's Weekly
Sonia Brownell (1918-1980) married George Orwell in 1949 because he said it would help him recover his health. Unfortunately, the marriage proved no panacea for tuberculosis, and 14 weeks after the wedding, he died, leaving Sonia, a talented editor associated with the magazine Horizon, as his sole heir. She also inherited his pseudonym (which she continued to use as her surname till the end of her life), and, in time, assumed the role of the ferocious Widow Orwell, jealous guardian of her husband's literary reputation. Her battles with upstart biographers and established publishers, her vicious tongue and her propensity for drink led to her being vilified as a grasping opportunist. Mary McCarthy used the occasion of Sonia's memorial service to summarize her weakest points, notes Spurling, and David Plante anatomized her in Difficult Women. Now her good friend Spurling, a highly regarded biographer, seeks to set the record straight with a portrait that emphasizes Sonia's vitality, generosity, kindness and support of writers like Jean Rhys, who were much in need of it. Though Spurling treads lightly over the more intimate aspects of Sonia's life and two marriages, she does remind readers that Sonia was more than just Orwell's relict; she was closely involved in the lives and careers of many of the most influential British, French and American artists and writers of the mid-20th century. Spurli