Keep the Aspidistra Flying

Plot and characters (summary)

The story centers on a protagonist who rejects a conventional career and lives in straitened circumstances while trying to maintain personal principles. The novel explores his relationships, everyday humiliations, and the pressures exerted by society and family expectations. Though the plot contains episodes of satire and dark comedy, its focus remains on the cost—emotional and practical—of sustained resistance to materialism.

Major themes

• Money and dignity: the tensions between economic survival and personal ideals.
• Middle-class respectability: the aspidistra plant symbolizes bourgeois values and domestic conformity.
• Art versus commerce: the difficulty of pursuing literary or artistic aims without compromising for pay.
• Social satire: critiques of advertising, consumer culture and class pretensions.

Context and style

Written during the 1930s, the novel reflects Orwell's ongoing interest in poverty, class, and social critique that appears across his early work. Its tone mixes plainspoken realism with satirical observation; characters are depicted in recognizably ordinary settings, and the narrative emphasizes moral dilemmas over melodrama.

Reception and notable facts

Keep the Aspidistra Flying occupies an important place among Orwell's early novels for its focused attack on commercial values and its use of a domestic emblem—the aspidistra plant—as shorthand for social conformity. Readers and critics often highlight the book as a bridge between Orwell's reportage on social conditions and his later, more famous dystopian works.