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Orwell was severely ill in 1938 and was advised to spend the winter in a warm climate.
The novelist L. H. Myers anonymously gave £ 300 to enable this and Orwell went with his wife to North Africa where he stayed, in French Morocco, mainly in Marrakesh, from September 1938 to March 1939.
( Orwell never learned the source of the money and he accepted it only on condition that it be considered a loan.
He repaid the loan, eight years later, when he began making money from the success of Animal Farm.
) Orwell wrote Coming Up for Air while he was in North Africa and left the manuscript at his agent's office within a few hours of arriving back in England on 30 March 1939.
It was submitted to Victor Gollancz, who had an option on Orwell's next three novels, in spite of the ' cold treatment which had been given when Homage to Catalonia was rejected.
' In fact Orwell heard in April 1939 that Gollancz had reservations about the book, and was delaying a decision to accept it.
The descriptions in the novel of a character who lectures at a meeting of Gollancz's Left Book Club, and of the meeting itself, were such that Gollancz ' could not have helped being offended by them.
' Nevertheless, the publisher did bring out the novel without demanding major changes and it was published on 12 June 1939.
It was the last Orwell novel to bear the Gollancz imprint.

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