Hermione Slater
Ravelston's girl of two years, rich and permanently sleepy. She is a Socialist because everyone is nowadays, will not read his magazine, and says of the working class that they smell.
Ravelston to stop pretending to be poor. She tells him so directly, more than once: keep proper servants, give up the poky flat, drop the beastly people who write for his paper.
The book
At a glance
- Philip Ravelston's girlfriend of two years
- Rich, or rather her family is
- They have never bothered; she says it is too much fag
- A Socialist because, she says, everyone is nowadays; has never read Ravelston's magazine
- Chapter 5, and again at Ravelston's flat in chapter 9
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeHermione Slater is the girlfriend of Philip Ravelston in George Orwell's 1936 novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying. Ravelston is a wealthy young man who edits and pays for a socialist magazine called Antichrist, lives in a small flat on purpose, and is the closest friend of Gordon Comstock, the penniless poet the novel follows.
She and Ravelston have been together two years and have not married, because, as she puts it, it is too much fag. She has her own key to his flat. Her money is family money. Orwell shows her almost entirely through Ravelston's eyes, and what Ravelston sees is warmth and sleepiness: wide young shoulders, hair and skin like a wheatfield in the sun, a woman who falls asleep the moment there is nothing to do and gets healthier the more she sleeps.
She is in the book to embarrass Ravelston's politics. He spends his days worrying about unemployed men in Middlesbrough living seven to a room on twenty-five shillings a week. She wants him to hire proper servants and take her out to supper. Orwell shows plainly which of the two wins: with Hermione lying against him in the back of a taxi, Middlesbrough seems a very long way off.
How the book draws them
- Permanently half asleepOrwell writes that whenever there was nothing particular to do, Hermione fell asleep as promptly as an animal, and the more she slept the healthier she got. She is discovered asleep in an armchair, wakes stretching and yawning, and lectures Ravelston in a taxi with her head on his chest.
- Her socialism"Of course I know you're a Socialist. So am I. I mean we're all Socialists nowadays. But I don't see why you have to give all your money away and make friends with the lower classes. You can be a Socialist AND have a good time, that's what I say." She yawns when the subject comes up and has never read a word of the magazine Ravelston publishes.
- The thing she keeps saying about poor peopleHer line is that she hates the lower classes because they smell. Ravelston asks her to say working class instead. "The working class, if you like, then. But they smell just the same." When he admits he actually likes them, she tells him that is disgusting, absolutely disgusting. He protests weakly and does not push it.
- The beggar outside the restaurantA gaunt, unshaven man steps in front of them on the pavement outside Modigliani's and asks for the price of a cup of tea. Ravelston's hand goes to his pocket automatically. Hermione takes him by the arm and pulls him inside. "You'd give away every penny you've got if I let you."
- What she thinks a poet isTold that Ravelston has spent the evening with Gordon Comstock, she asks how much he borrowed. When she hears that Ravelston went without dinner rather than embarrass a man who could not pay his share, she calls him a silly old ass and Gordon a little beast, and orders a taxi to a restaurant that stays open until two.
- How Gordon avoids herThey meet once and she treats him, in his account, like dirt. After that, during the week he spends in Ravelston's flat with nowhere else to go, he leaves the building the moment she arrives. She comes three times. On one of those evenings he stays out in the street until after midnight.