Inside the Whale

1940 essay by George Orwell

"Inside the Whale" is an essay in three parts written by George Orwell in 1940. It is primarily a review of Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller with Orwell discoursing more widely over English literature in the 1920s and 1930s. The biblical story of Jonah and the whale is used as a metaphor for accepting experience without seeking to change it, Jonah inside the whale being comfortably protected from the problems of the outside world. It was published, alongside two other pieces by Orwell, 11 March 1940 by Gollancz in Orwell's first collection of essays, Inside the Whale and Other Essays.

Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer was published in 1934 by Obelisk Press in Paris. Set in France (primarily Paris) during the 1930s, Miller tells of his life as a struggling writer. There are many passages explicitly describing the narrator's sexual encounters, but the book does not solely focus on this subject. Orwell had also lived in Paris for 18 months in 1928 to 1929 and used his experiences to write Down and Out in Paris and London. Orwell had dinner with Henry Miller in Paris in December 1936 when on his way to take part in the Spanish Civil War. Miller gave Orwell a corduroy jacket which was a more suitable outfit for fighting than the blue suit Orwell was wearing.

Andy Croft has noted that in its coverage of 1930s British literature, "Inside the Whale" ignores women writers active in that period (such as Rebecca West and Naomi Mitchison) as well as working class writers such as Walter Greenwood, thus creating a misleading impression that the period was dominated by the work of middle class male writers like Auden. Janet Montefiore strongly criticized "Inside the Whale" in her book Men and Women Writers of the 1930s: the dangerous flood of history. Montefiore states that "Inside the Whale" is "clear, vigorous and well written: it is also aggressive, misleading and full of holes", and claims that "Inside the Whale" and Virginia Woolf's essay "The Leaning Tower" are responsible for creating an inaccurate view of 1930s literature. Montefiore argues Orwell misreads Auden's poem Spain: 1937, claiming that the poem's phrase "necessary murder" refers to the horrors of war rather than Orwell's view of it as referring to political assassinations. Montefiore also disputes Orwell's view that British writers of the time had comfortable lives, pointing out that both Storm Jameson and Naomi Mitchison worked to help European victims of fascism, and that Christopher Isherwood and his partner had to live in exile because of their homosexuality. Montefiore argues that "Inside the Whale" "anticipates Cold War condemnations of 'premature anti fascists by regarding all the left wing writers of the period "as uniform tools or stooges of Moscow".