Cyril Connolly wrote two reviews at the time of the novel's publication.[18] In the Daily Telegraph he described it as a "savage and bitter book", and wrote that "the truths which the author propounds are so disagreeable that one ends by dreading their mention".[19] In the New Statesman he wrote that it gave "a harrowing and stark account of poverty", and referred to its "clear and violent language, at times making the reader feel he is in a dentist's chair with the drill whirring".[20]
Orwell wrote in a letter to George Woodcock dated 28 September 1946 that Keep the Aspidistra Flying was one of the two or three of his books that he was ashamed of because it "was written simply as an exercise and I oughtn't to have published it, but I was desperate for money. At that time I simply hadn't a book in me, but I was half starved and had to turn out something to bring in £100 or so."[21] Orwell did not want either this book or A Clergyman's Daughter reprinted during his lifetime.[22]
For an edition of the BBC Television show Omnibus (The Road to the Left, broadcast 10 January 1971), Melvyn Bragg interviewed Norman Mailer. Bragg said that he "just assumed Mailer had read Orwell. In fact he's mad on him." Of Keep the Aspidistra Flying Mailer said: "It is perfect from the first page to the last."[23]
The novel has won other admirers besides Mailer, notably Lionel Trilling, who called it "a summa of all the criticisms of a commercial civilization that have ever been made".[24]
Orwell's biographer Jeffrey Meyers finds the novel flawed by weaknesses in plot, style and characterisation, but praises "a poignant and moving quality that comes from Orwell's perceptive portrayal of the alienation and loneliness of poverty, and from Rosemary's tender response to Gordon's mean misery".[25]
Tosco Fyvel, literary editor of Tribune from 1945 to 1949, and a friend and colleague of Orwell's during the last ten years of Orwell's life, found it interesting that "through Gordon Comstock Orwell expressed violent dislike of London's crowded life and mass advertising— a foretaste here of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Orwell has Gordon reacting to a poster saying Corner Table Enjoys His Meal With Bovex in a manner already suggesting that of the later novel:[26]
Gordon examined the thing with the intimacy of hatred.... Corner Table grins at you, seemingly optimistic, with a flash of false teeth. But what is behind the grin? Desolation, emptiness, prophecies of doom. —For can you not see [—] Behind that slick self-satisfaction, that tittering fat-bellied triviality, there's nothing but a frightful emptiness, a secret despair? And the reverberations of future wars.
Catherine Blount points to the theme of a London couple needing to go into the countryside in order to find a private place to have sex, which has a significant place in the plot of Aspidistra and which is taken up prominently in Nineteen Eighty-Four.[27]
Orwell's biographer D. J. Taylor writes of Gordon Comstock that, "Like Dorothy in A Clergyman's Daughter and like Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four, he rebels against the system and is ultimately swallowed up by it ... Like Winston Smith, he rebels, the rebellion fails, and he has to reach an accommodation with a world he'd previously disparaged."[22]
