Reading Julia

The Orwell Youth Fellows interview Sandra Newman

Every year, the winners and runners-up of the Orwell Youth Prize are invited to join the Orwell Youth Fellows, collective of young writers developing new Orwell-inspired projects and encouraging other young people to take part in our programmes. Earlier this year they met Sandra Newman, author of Julia, to discuss her approach to expanding Orwell’s world…

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Amelia: Did you have any expectations of responses to Julia, being a rather daring rewrite of a classic?

Yes, I was thinking about that all the time. I mean, the book is in conversation with the original, so I was expecting people to read it through the original, so I spent a lot of time thinking about their expectations. I was writing to those expectations in a way, sometimes trying to please readers of Nineteen Eighty-Four by giving them something they'd always wanted (like showing them Big Brother), and more often trying to surprise them or work against their assumptions.  

I was also braced for angry responses to the idea of the book, especially because it was being sold as a feminist retelling, which reliably brings out a certain contingent of angry men. And that did happen, but it really wasn't as bad as I expected (no doubt because this group of people aren't great readers of books). 

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James with his advance copy of Julia!

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James: The book sticks very closely to the events and established information in Nineteen Eighty-Four - were there any moments when you wanted to add something to the narrative but found you couldn’t because it wouldn’t fit with the lore?

The main thing I did try to add in, but my editor made me cut it out, was perfume. I found it very irritating that Orwell wrote as if totalitarian governments forced women to dress in masculine ways, and outlawed scent and make-up, when authoritarians are actually very strict about traditional gender roles. I mean, in the real Soviet Union of the time, perfume and lipstick were produced in government-owned factories and given socialist names like Red Moscow. The idea that communists were trying to turn women into men and pervert their natures by forcing them to wear overalls… it's a product of paranoid chauvinism that isn't worthy of Orwell. 

So in my original manuscript, every sufficiently large gathering of people reeks of a cheap scent called "Radiant Future." But my editor was right to cut it out. You have to work within the world of the original even when you find it incredibly annoying. 

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Anya: Did you seek to, and did you face any particular challenges in, answering feminist questions raised by Orwell's original text in a way that is relevant today?

I'm finding this question hard to answer, because I think the feminist questions raised by Orwell's text are still relevant today, maybe especially relevant today, without really having to reinvent them. The focus in the book is largely on reproductive politics, and there's also a lot of stuff (which Orwell, to his credit, seems to do consciously) where Julia is a much more interesting and resourceful person than Winston, but Winston is completely incapable of developing any real curiosity about anything she does, or any respect for her intelligence (he never seems to notice that she's remarkably good at things he can't do at all, and she has to lead him by the hand through the first stages of their relationship). The invisibility of women's lives and capacities to men is still sadly with us, and reproductive politics are obviously more contentious than ever, so I was able to work within the world Orwell created; the shift of viewpoint was more than enough to produce an abundance of feminism. 

Noah D: What would be in your own personal Room 101? And what do you think would be in Julia’s?

For me, it would be giant cockroaches, though I think ultimately they aren't that frightening. I mean, cockroaches don't actually harm you, so no matter how long the Ministry of Love leaves you penned up with a lot of cockroaches, you're going to come out with nothing worse than a really, really horrible creeping feeling. And I actually do know that, so I think I would just grin and bear it (or keep my lips firmly closed and bear it) instead of betraying any of my loved ones. And my other great fear is a dying in a plane crash, which would be tricky to accommodate in Room 101. So I've always felt like the Love people would have to make shift with ordinary torture in my case. 

For Julia, I think Diana is right: her fear is disfigurement, and it comes from her childhood experience of people made monstrous by starvation, who are therefore seen as less than human by the more fortunate villagers. And later of the ex-prisoners at the Chestnut Tree Cafe, where the evidence of torture on their bodies marks them out as unpersons who can't be spoken to, who are objects of terror rather than compassion. Her whole survival strategy consists in being liked, in engaging with people on a human level in the subtle ways that are still possible in this world. She feels that, if she ever loses that, every horror becomes inevitable and there is nothing that can save her. All her fears are about this in one way or another. 

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