Why TS Eliot turned down Animal Farm

George Orwell's masterpiece Animal Farm almost never got published because TS Eliot, then a publisher, rejected the manuscript because it was "unconvincing".

According to papers released by the poet's 82-year-old widow Valerie Eliot, Orwell's allegory on Stalinist communism was turned down by Eliot - then a director of Faber & Faber - in 1944 because he was not persuaded by the book's "Trotskyite" politics.

In a highly critical response to the manuscript, Eliot said Animal Farm's plot "which I take to be generally Trotsykite, is not convincing".

He argued: "We have no conviction that this is the right point of view from which to criticise the political situation at the current time."

The author of The Waste Land also took umbrage with Orwell's pigs. "Your pigs are far more intelligent than the other animals, and therefore are the best qualified to run the farm - in fact there couldn't have been an Animal Farm without them: so that what was needed (someone might argue) was not more communism but more public-spirited pigs," Eliot thundered.

The letter came to light after Valerie, Eliot's second wife and secretary at Faber, released parts of his previously unseen archive to the BBC for a forthcoming Arena documentary. Eliot, who was 38 years older than Valerie, died in 1965.

Other memorabilia include a review by Eliot of a performance by a young Vanessa Redgrave in The Lady From the Sea in 1960. He described the actress as "someone to watch. Good in a very difficult part".

Eliot was one of four publishers to reject Animal Farm. Orwell finally succeeded in having his novel published the following year by Secker & Warburg. ·