Nellie Limouzin, Eugène Adam (Lanti), George Orwell, Esperanto

Here are some more descriptions of Nellie Limouzin, George Orwell's aunt.

Orwell used to visit his mother's bohemian sister, Nellie Limouzin, a militant socialist and suffragette. Though he rarely sought her help, his aunt could always be counted on for a small handout. She'd acted in vaudeville and was married to a Frenchman, Eugane Adam, who'd been involved in the Russian Revolution in Petrograd in October 1917. "The marriage was not happy," according to one of their friends. "She had no character. She was soft, without backbone, without willpower." Adam, a fanatic who refused to speak any language but Esperanto, later abandoned Nellie, wound up in Mexico, and killed himself in 1947. If Orwell had gone to Paris with the idea of exploring the French half of his heritage, he must have been disappointed, for he had little contact with French people of his own social class. He inhabited the underworld of downtrodden foreign workers, and Paris reinforced his Englishness.

SOURCE: Meyers, Jeffrey. "Orwell And the Experience of France," World and I, 1 Nov 2003. See slightly different passage in Meyers' book Orwell: Wintry Conscience of a Generation.

Mary Myfanwy Westrope had been a member of the I L P [Independent Labour Party] since 1905 and by 1935 was a veteran of the women’s rights movement. It seems her pacifism kept her out of the militant Pankhurst suffragettes. Francis Westrope was imprisoned as a conscientious objector in the First World War, where he met the pianist Frank Merrick and Fenner Brockway. Merrick says that Westrope and he became interested in Esperanto by accident while in prison: a grammar was the only mind-stretching book available, apart from theological works. Perhaps there was some accident about Westrope’s interest, but Esperanto had an ideology of brotherhood of man and international fraternity about it that must have appealed: the tower of Babel, not Mammon or Eve’s apple, was to him the primal curse. Given one language, there would be perpetual peace. But the Esperantist cause was nothing if not eclectic and ecumenical: it could sail alongside or take up on board many another great cause or small crankery — including vegetarianism in the Westropes’ case. Esperanto led them to meet Nellie Limouzin and Eugene Adam. Like Adam, Myfanwy Westrope had visited the Soviet Union (in 1931), and she too had returned profoundly disillusioned, not with socialism but with what she saw there. She plunged into I L P activity even more heartily on her return.

SOURCE: Crick, Bernard. George Orwell: A Life (London: Penguin Books Ltd, 1992), Chapter 7: "Hard Times Or Struggling Up (1932–34)".

Orwell's aunt, Nellie Limouzin,and her lover, the Esperanto language activist Eugène Adam, welcomed Orwell into their home, from which they ran an Esperantist workers' association. The left-leaning couple engaged Orwell in spirited political debate, and Orwell later pointed to his time in Paris as influential in forming his identity as a socialist. Some scholars also believe that some of the Newspeak language created in 1984 can be traced back to his exposure to Esperanto in Paris.

SOURCE: Powell, Jessica. Literary Paris: A Guide (New York: New York Review of Books, 2006), p. 155.

George Orwell, Nellie Limouzin, Paul Gille, Esperanto

SOURCE: Blair, Eric A. (George Orwell). Letter to Leonard Moore, 27 January 1934; in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell. Volume IV: An Age Like This, 1920-1940; edited by Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (1968).

In this letter Orwell refers to a French book which appears to him to be of an "anti-materialist, anti-marxist tendency." Footnote 3 clarifies:

Essai d’une philosophie de la dignité humaine by Paul Gille which had been suggested to Orwell by his aunt, Nellie Adam, neé Limouzin, then living in Paris, because her husband was translating it into Esperanto. Orwell had asked Moore in a letter of 16 January 1934 about the prospects of getting a translation of the book published in England. He never did the translation.

The husband in question was none other than Eugène Adam, known by his pseudonym Lanti. Here is the reference to his translation:

Gille, Paul. Skizo pri Filozofio de la Homa Digno, de Paŭlo Ĵil (Paul Gille), el la franca lingvo trad. E. Lanti. Paris: Sennacieca Asocio Tutmonda, 1934. 148 p.

Here is some information about Paul Gille, in French, in the Dictionnaire international des militants anarchistes.

Orwell's aunt Nellie Limouzin is mentioned repeatedly in the Wikipedia entry on Orwell. Here is a passage on Orwell's life in Hampstead:

This job was as a part-time assistant in "Booklover's Corner", a second-hand bookshop in Hampstead run by Francis and Myfanwy Westrope who were friends of Nellie Limouzin in the Esperanto movement. The Westropes had an easy-going outlook and provided him with comfortable accommodation at Warwick Mansions, Pond Street.

There are some other details in the article on Orwell in Vikipedio, in Esperanto.

One can find hundreds of references to Nellie Limouzin in a Google search. In the process one can find oblique references to Lanti as well. Here is one:

He [Orwell] chose never to mention in print that he had himself mixed with many countercultural types, including his aunt, Nellie Limouzin—a bohemian whose husband was a socialist and stalwart of the Esperanto movement—and the Westropes, who owned the bookshop in Hampstead where he worked in the mid-1930s. Francis Westrope had been a conscientious objector in the war and was a member of the Independent Labour Party; his wife, Myfanwy, campaigned for women's rights—both were keen Esperantists. His backer Mabel Fierz, too, lived in a big house in Hampstead Garden Suburb and leaned towards a mystical and spiritual socialism.

SOURCE: Laity, Paul. "A Brief History of Cranks", Cabinet, Issue 20, Winter 2005/06.

In the same article, a cartoon can be found with this explanation:

Londoners, on their Sundays off, made special excursions by train to study Letchworth's strange collection of smock-wearing Esperanto speakers and theosophists: a cartoon from a local newspaper showed day-trippers at a human zoo. "Daddy, I want to see them feed!" pleads a child. Signs for visitors include: "To the Long Nebbed Sandal Footed Raisin Shifters," "This Way to the Non-Tox Pub," and "To the Hairy-Headed Banana Munchers."

Ouch!