They moved to Paris, where life was cheaper and where Mrs Lackersteen intended to dedicate herself wholly to Art. The two women could not, under Mrs Lackersteen’s management, live on three pounds a week in England. Mrs Lackersteen was left with an income of £150 a year, which was to die with her. He died when she was twenty, of influenza. Elizabeth was taken away from school, to continue her education at a succession of cheap, beastly schools, with gaps of a term or two when her father could not pay the fees. Mrs Lackersteen’s pose was that of an artist exiled among ‘the Philistines’ - these, needless to say, included her husband - and it was a pose that gave her almost unlimited scope for making a nuisance of herself. Painting is the only art that can be practised without either talent or hard work. After messing about for years with such things as Women’s Suffrage and Higher Thought, and making many abortive attempts at literature, she had finally taken up with painting. Elizabeth’s mother had been an incapable, half-baked, vapouring, self-pitying woman who shirked all the normal duties of life on the strength of sensibilities which she did not possess.

He was a tea-broker, and his fortunes fluctuated greatly, but he was by nature too optimistic to put money aside in prosperous phases. Her father had been less of a drunkard than his brother Tom, but he was a man of similar stamp. Elizabeth was just turned twenty-two, and was an orphan.

George orwell burma