[4] Soon after her husband's death, Sonia sold the film rights to Animal Farm to a pair of movie executives, unaware they were agents of the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

[citation needed] Brownell first met Orwell when she worked as the assistant to Cyril Connolly, a friend of his from Eton College, at the literary magazine Horizon.

[6] Orwell biographer Bernard Crick told The Washington Post he did not think that Brownell "had much influence on his life" and asserted that "it was more or less an accident that they married.

[9] As Orwell wrote in Nineteen Eighty-Four, "the girl from the fiction department... was looking at him... She was very young, he thought, she still expected something from life... She would not accept it as a law of nature that the individual is always defeated... All you needed was luck and cunning and boldness.

Brownell married Michael Pitt-Rivers in 1958,[6] and had affairs with several British painters, including Lucian Freud, William Coldstream and Victor Pasmore.

"[13] Brownell died penniless in London of a brain tumour in December 1980, having spent a fortune trying to protect Orwell's name and having been swindled out of her remaining funds by an unscrupulous accountant.