HIS public image was as an austere socialist of impeccable moral standards. But a new book claims that George Orwell sexually assaulted a young woman who was his closest friend when he was growing up and who inspired characters in some of his most famous novels, including Julia in 1984.

The episode left Jacintha Buddicom bruised, with a torn skirt and in tears. The author never spoke of it, but scholars of Orwell believe it displayed the ham-fisted approach to seduction that hampered him for decades. It is also thought to have provided ideas for the jilted love portrayed in Burmese Days, his first novel.

Despite his previous intimacy with Buddicom and her family, they broke off relations until 1949 when she wrote to him as he was dying of tuberculosis.

The book, Eric & Us – Postscript, published by Finlay, is partly a reprinting of Buddicom’s memoir of her childhood with the author, whose real name was Eric Blair. But it also includes a postscript by Dione Venables, her cousin, on the basis of long conversations with Buddicom, who died in 1993, and her sister Guiny.

Venables, 76, from Chichester, West Sussex, describes how Orwell became closer and closer to Buddicom. He had been a family friend since he was 11 and visited during holidays from Eton. One day in September 1921, on a walk with Jacintha in the lanes around Rickmansworth, Hertfordshire, he went too far.

Although Buddicom, at 20, was two years older than Orwell, he was 6ft 4in tall and towered nearly 18in above her.

Venables writes: “Eric, it seems, had attempted to take things further and make serious love to Jacintha. He had held her down . . . and though she struggled, yelling at him to stop, he had torn her skirt and bruised a shoulder and her left hip.”

Soon after, Orwell joined the Indian Imperial Police in Burma – an experience that led him to reject the empire. He never saw Buddicom again.

“They were such a unit for eight years, they did all their growing up together,” said Venables. “He wanted to be betrothed to Jacintha. But because he had too big a dollop of testosterone one day, he jumped on her.”

Venables published the story after encouragement from Gordon Bowker, Orwell’s biographer. “Orwell had a record of it.,” he said. “He tried the same thing later on a woman in Southwold, but she was a strapping PE teacher and fought him off.”

Until 1949, Buddicom never realised Eric Blair and George Orwell were one. When she found out, she wrote to him. He replied with two letters and managed one wheezy phone call, but they did not meet and he married his second wife in October 1949, dying the following year.

Venables said that despite their long separation, she “had been thinking about him tremendously since they lost touch . . . She never married. Nobody came up to his standard”.

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