Orwell's Ghost: A discussion with Laura Beers, Historian, American University

On Friday, November 8, the Brattleboro Literary Festival presented a Literary Cocktail Hou, with Laura Beers, author of "Orwell’s Ghosts:Wisdom and Warnings for the Twenty-First Century."
For the 75th anniversary of Nineteen Eighty-Four, Laura Beers explores George Orwell’s still-radical ideas and why they are critical today in her new book, Orwell’s Ghosts. First published in 1949, Nineteen Eighty-Four remains the book we turn to when truth is mutilated, when language is distorted, when power is abused, when we want to know how bad things can get.
It is still, in the words of Anthony Burgess, author of A Clockwork Orange, “an apocalyptical codex of our worst fears”. George Orwell dedicated his career to exposing social injustice and political duplicity, urging his readers to face hard truths about Western society and politics.
Now, the uncanny parallels between the interwar era and our own-rising inequality, censorship, and challenges to traditional social hierarchies-make his writing even more of the moment. Invocations of Orwell and his classic dystopian novel 1984 have reached new heights, with both sides of the political spectrum embracing the rhetoric of Orwellianism. In this book, historian
Laura Beers considers Orwell’s full body of work-his six novels, three nonfiction works, and brilliant essays on politics, language, and the class system-to examine what “Orwellian” truly means and reveal the misconstrued thinker in all his complexity. She explores how Orwell’s writing on free speech addresses the proliferation of “fake news” and the emergence of cancel culture, highlights his vivid critiques of capitalism and the oppressive nature of the British Empire, and, in contrast, analyzes his failure to understand feminism.
Timely, wide-ranging, and thought-provoking, Orwell’s Ghosts investigates how the writings of a lionized champion of truth and freedom can help us face the crises of modernity.
Laura Beers is professor of history at American University in Washington, D.C and the author of Orwell's Ghosts: Wisdom and Warnings for the Twenty-First Century, Red Ellen: The Life of Ellen Wilkinson, Socialist, Feminist, Internationalist, which was awarded the 2017 Stansky Prize for best book published in the field of modern British history, and Your Britain: Media and the Making of the Labour Party. She is the co-editor of Brave New World: Imperial and Democratic Nation-Building in Britain between the Wars. In addition to her academic work, Professor Beers has written on British and comparative politics for CNN, the Washington Post’s “Made by History” column, the New Statesmen, and the London Review of Books. She lives in Washington, DC.