aspidistra

You'd better go back to the aspidistra and wait for me.

When Orwell received news that Keep the Aspidistra Flying had been published, he was already transforming the diary of his northern journey into a novel that would become The Road to Wigan Pier.

She had always " porch plants" about, grown from slips, of geranium and aspidistra; fuchsia, " the Georgia flower, " sansivaria and elephant-ear and impatient Sultana, all blooming lushly in containers of old tin.

For most of the fifteen months he spent at the bookshop, Orwell worked on Keep the Aspidistra Flying, a novel about a poet who struggles to gain recognition from a literary elite that is mostly closed to him.