Sonia Orwell She did not understand that there was no such thing as happiness, that the only victory lay in the far future, long after you were dead." Together with David Astor and Richard Rees, George Orwell's literary executor, Brownell established the George Orwell Archive at University College London, which opened in 1960. Brownell was fiercely protective of Orwell's estate and edited, with Ian Angus, "The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell" (4 volumes, Secker & Warburg, London, 1968). Brownell married Michael Pitt-Rivers in 1958, and had affairs with several British painters, including Lucian Freud, William Coldstream and Victor Pasmore.
George Orwell Daphne Patai said: "Of course he was homophobic. That has nothing to do with his relations with his homosexual friends. Certainly, he had a negative attitude and a certain kind of anxiety, a denigrating attitude towards homosexuality. That is definitely the case. I think his writing reflects that quite fully." Orwell used the homophobic epithets "nancy" and "pansy", notably in his expressions of contempt for what he called the "pansy Left", and "nancy poets", i.e. left-wing homosexual or bisexual writers and intellectuals such as Stephen Spender and W. H. Auden. The protagonist of "Keep the Aspidistra Flying", Gordon Comstock, conducts