Eileen Blair

Eileen Blair
Born	Eileen Maud O'Shaughnessy (1905-09-25)25 September 1905 South Shields, County Durham, England
Died	29 March 1945(1945-03-29) (aged 39) Newcastle upon Tyne, England
Resting place	St Andrew's and Jesmond Cemetery, West Jesmond, Newcastle upon Tyne
Other names	Eileen O'Shaughnessy
Spouse	George Orwell ​ (m. 1936)​
Children	Richard Blair

Eileen Maud Blair (née O'Shaughnessy, 25 September 1905 – 29 March 1945) was the first wife of George Orwell (Eric Arthur Blair). During World War II, she worked for the Censorship Department of the Ministry of Information in London and the Ministry of Food.

She was born in South Shields in the northeast of England. Her mother was Marie O'Shaughnessy and her father was Lawrence O'Shaughnessy, a customs collector. She died at the age of 39 during a hysterectomy.

Education and early life

O'Shaughnessy attended Sunderland Church High School. In the autumn of 1924, she entered St Hugh's College, Oxford, where she studied English. In 1927, she received a higher second-class degree. By choice there followed a succession of jobs 'of no special consequence and with no connection from one to the next', which she held briefly, and which began with work as an assistant mistress at Silchester House, a girls' boarding school in Taplow in the Thames valley, and included being a secretary; a reader for the elderly Dame Elizabeth Cadbury; and the proprietor of an office in Victoria Street, London, for typing and secretarial work. When she closed the office, she took up freelance journalism and sold an occasional feature piece to the Evening News. She helped her brother, Laurence, a thoracic surgeon, by typing, proofreading, and editing his scientific papers and books.

In the autumn of 1934, Eileen enrolled at University College London for a two-year graduate course in educational psychology, leading to a Master of Arts. Eileen was particularly interested in testing intelligence in children "and quite early decided upon that as the subject for the thesis she would be writing". Elizaveta Fen (pen name of Lydia Jackson Jiburtovich), a fellow student who became one of O'Shaughnessy's closest friends, met her for the first time at University College: "She was twenty-eight years old and looked several years younger. She was tall and slender, her shoulders rather broad and high. She had blue eyes and dark brown, naturally wavy hair. George once said that she had 'a cat's face' – and one could see that this was true in a most attractive sense..."

She was very close to her elder brother Laurence O'Shaughnessy, a thoracic surgeon, but even so, in a letter she described her brother as "one of nature's Fascists".

Marriage

The home in Hampstead has a blue plaque

Eileen met Eric Blair in the spring of 1935. At the time Blair was living at 77 Parliament Hill in Hampstead, occupying a spare room in the first floor flat of Rosalind Henschel Obermeyer, a niece of the conductor and composer Sir George Henschel and a friend of Mabel Fierz.

Rosalind Obermeyer was taking an advanced course in psychology at University College London; one evening she invited some of her friends and acquaintances to a party. One "was an attractive young woman whom Rosalind did not know especially well, although they often sat next to each other at lectures: her name was Eileen O'Shaughnessy." In her memoirs, Elizaveta Fen recalled that Orwell and his friend and mentor Richard Rees "draped" at the fireplace, looking, she thought, "moth-eaten and prematurely aged."

Blair and O'Shaughnessy married the next year, on 9 June 1936, at St Mary's Church, Wallington, Hertfordshire (as Eric Arthur Blair and Eileen Maud O'Shaughnessy. At this time he was Orwell only in his writing, his friends knew him as Eric or Blair, and he "never quite got around to changing it"). Blair, though a non-practising member of the Church of England, "was sufficiently a traditionalist to wish to be married in it". They tried to have children, but Eileen did not become pregnant, and they learned later that Orwell was sterile, as he told Rayner Heppenstall, and as Eileen confided to Elizaveta Fen.

Spanish Civil War

Eileen joined Orwell in Spain in early 1937 during the Spanish Civil War. Eileen volunteered for a post in the office of John McNair, the leader of the Independent Labour Party who coordinated the arrival of British volunteers, and with the help of Georges Kopp paid visits to her husband, bringing him English tea, chocolate, and cigars.

The small unit of up to 35 volunteers from the British Independent Labour Party or ILP was attached to the very large Workers' Party of Marxist Unification or POUM. Orwell was soon posted to the front, while Eileen worked in Barcelona as a "French-English shorthand typist". However, Anna Funder, claims in her 2023 book Wifedom that Orwell’s biographers have underrated Eileen’s achievements. Funder believes that Eileen also organised all logistics for the ILP men at the front, running, Funder says, "the supply, communications and banking operation for the entire contingent." Eileen also worked in the propaganda department, producing the ILP's newspaper and radio show with Charles Orr.

After a different Marxist faction began to control the police department in Barcelona, the political situation deteriorated. The POUM was accused of collaborating with the enemy, and by mid-June 1937 was made illegal. Orwell (on his return from the front) and Eileen were now in danger.

Much of the evidence for the pair’s time in Spain comes from Homage to Catalonia (1938), the book in which Orwell revealed his first-hand experience of how Stalin’s agents in Spain sabotaged the socialist cause and set out to eliminate their non-Moscow-aligned Marxist allies, notably POUM. He describes how Stalin’s agents, once they gained control of the police, imprisoned or murdered several of his and Eileen’s friends or colleagues.

In this book Orwell disguised Eileen’s involvement in the ILP office. He does describe how, after most of POUM’s staff in Barcelona were arrested in early June, Eileen was left free. He says that she believed she was being watched as (in his words) a “decoy duck”, to catch her husband. Yet she eluded the vigilance of the watchers, and managed to intercept and warn Orwell when he returned to Barcelona.

Realizing that their cause had been sabotaged, Orwell, together with McNair and another ex soldier from POUM’s ILP contingent, Stafford Cottman slept “rough” to avoid arrest, while scrambling to get their passports and exit documents in order. Then on 15 June 1937 the whole party, including Eileen, escaped from Barcelona by train to the French border, disguising themselves on the train as a tourist party. In France, the Orwells diverted to Banyuls-sur-Mer for a short stay, and returned to England.

They were lucky. Orwell’s colleague Bob Smillie was stopped at the border with France, and died in prison. A Stalinist verdict of treason against George and Eileen was issued soon after their escape.

Eileen O'Shaughnessy’s role in Spain, and Orwell’s account of it

There is debate over Orwell’s somewhat cryptic account of Eileen’s time in Barcelona. Anna Funder believes that this is a particularly revealing example of an attempt, both by Orwell and by his biographers, to erase or minimise the importance of Eileen in his life and work:

Eileen got them both out of Spain by fronting up to the same police prefecture those men [who raided her hotel room] had probably been sent from, to get the visas they needed to leave. One biographer eliminates her with the passive voice, writing: 'By now, thanks to the British consulate, their passports were in order.' In Homage, Orwell mentions 'my wife' 37 times but never once names her. No character can come to life without a name. But from a wife, which is a job description, all can be stolen. I wondered what she felt as she typed those pages.

However, the American feminist Rebecca Solnit (author of Orwell’s Roses 2021), criticizes this claim as part of a pattern of opinionated claims by Funder, tending to diminish Orwell and “make him out to be a bad person, and his wife a sad one.” She sees Eileen rather as “a blithely witty, valiant figure”.

The biographer Jeffrey Meyers, and the Orwell researcher Martin Tyrrell also reject most of Funder’s claims. They argue that it was not Eileen but the British consulate, using diplomatic immunity, that obtained from the dangerous police department the necessary visa-signatures that enabled the party to leave Spain: “The reason none of them comments on Eileen’s visit to the chief of police is because Eileen had not visited the chief of police."

Myers and Tyrell recognise that in Homage to Catalonia, Orwell disguised Eileen’s role in the ILP, and suppressed her name, implying that she was there simply as a supportive spouse. But they suggest that his motive was to protect her from reprisals, especially after the publication of his anti-Stalinist book. Similarly, Quentin Kropp of the Orwell Society contends that Orwell did not mention Eileen’s name “partly to protect her in a dangerous situation”. Myers writes

after being convicted of treason and condemned to death, he feared he could be murdered by Soviet agents whom he knew were operating in England, and wanted to protect Eileen from dangerous reprisals by hiding her connection to POUM. Funder repeatedly calls his very real fear “paranoia”.

Funder recognises that Eileen retyped drafts of Orwell’s book, and knew how she was described in it; but suggests that she was powerless to oppose his “patriarchal” reluctance to record her achievements. Funder concedes that George and Eileen were named in 1937 on a Stalinist verdict, which alleged they were both “ILP liaison agents of POUM”; that they believed by 1940 that there was also a Nazi arrest-list of British leftwing intellectuals in the event of a Nazi or fascist government being installed in Britain; and that Orwell remained very nervous of Stalinist assassination attempts even after reaching Britain. Yet she cites Eileen’s other biographer Sylvia Topp, in her 2020 book Eileen: The Making of George Orwell, as supporting her own view that Eileen bravely obtained the group’s visas, and as remarking: “There is no doubt that Eileen was responsible for saving all of their lives.”

However, Tyrell, reviewing Funder’s Wifedom in the Dublin Review of Books, says that Funder has mis-remembered the context of this quotation. Topp was talking of Eileen’s courage in assisting Orwell and his comrades to avoid probable arrest on the train from Barcelona. She did this by travelling with them, and helping them to seem not a group of soldiers escaping the war but a mixed party of rich British tourists. Topp says

‘Having a British woman with them on the train added to their chances of avoiding suspicion. As they escaped safely from Catalonia that day, there is no doubt that Eileen was responsible for saving all their lives.’

Orwell, publishing so soon after the event, was probably constrained in what he could safely say about those who had helped in the party’s escape from Spain. It is possible, but not proved, that Eileen (among others) played a more heroic role than Orwell describes. Any lack of crediting was at the time of less importance, in that Homage to Catalonia received little attention during her (or his) lifetime. However, after the success of his 1949 book Nineteen Eighty-Four, it was rediscovered, praised, and widely read, making it regrettable that within Homage to Catalonia Eileen does not emerge more vividly.

Return to England and Second World War

At the start of World War II, Eileen began working in the Censorship Department of the Ministry of Information in London, and stayed during the week with her family in Greenwich. She was the main breadwinner for the Orwells at this time.

Eileen's brother, Laurence, was killed by a bomb during the evacuation from Dunkirk, after which, according to Elizaveta Fen, "her grip on life, which had never been very firm, loosened considerably". She was increasingly unwell from uterine bleeding and left her job at the Ministry of Information in 1941. In December 1941 women were conscripted to work, and she began working at the Ministry of Food.

In June 1944 she and Eric adopted a three-week-old boy they named Richard Horatio. In one of her last letters to Eric, Eileen wrote of arrangements for renting and decorating Barnhill, Jura, the house where Orwell wrote most of Nineteen Eighty-Four, but she died without seeing Barnhill.

Death

Eileen's brother, Laurence O'Shaughnessy, had married Gwen Hunton; Gwen had a property, "Greystone" near Carlton, County Durham, which had been left empty on the death of her maiden aunt. The Blairs stayed there on occasion during 1944 and 1945. Gwen evacuated her children to the location when the "flying-bomb" raids began, and Richard went there when the Blairs had been bombed out of their flat in Maida Vale in June 1944.

In early 1945, Eileen was in very poor health and went to stay there. Joyce Pritchard, the O'Shaughnessys' nanny, said that Eileen had visited Greystone frequently between July 1944 and March 1945.

Eileen had been living with uterine bleeding for many years. In 1945 she booked herself for a hysterectomy with Dr Harvey Evers, against the advice of London doctors, who, because Eileen was anaemic, would operate only after a month of blood transfusions. Eileen worried about the cost of staying in a hospital that long.

Eileen died on 29 March 1945 in Newcastle upon Tyne under anesthetic. She was thirty-nine. In the words of the inquest: "Cardiac failure whilst under anaesthetic of ether and chloroform skilfully and properly administered for operation for removal of uterus." At the bottom of the report was a handwritten note, "The deceased was in a very anaemic condition." Harvey Evers did not attend the inquest. No one was charged. Eileen and Richard had been living at Greystone at the time, with Orwell working in Paris as a war correspondent for The Observer. He reached Greystone on Saturday, 31 March.

Eileen is buried in Saint Andrew's and Jesmond Cemetery, West Jesmond, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Influence on Orwell's writing

Some scholars believe that Eileen had a large influence on Orwell's writing. It is suggested that Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four may have been influenced by one of Eileen's poems, "End of the Century, 1984". The poem was written in 1934, to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the school she went to, Sunderland Church High School, and to look ahead 50 years to the school's centenary in 1984.

Although the poem was written a year before she met Blair, there are some similarities between the futuristic vision of Eileen's poem and that in Nineteen Eighty-Four, including the use of mind control, and the eradication of personal freedom by a police state.

Anna Funder argues that Eileen collaborated with Orwell "in a subtle, indirect way" on Animal Farm. Orwell originally planned to write an essay, but Eileen suggested a fable. They worked on it together in the evenings, and the Orwells' friends can see Eileen's style and humor in the novel.

References

Sources

• Funder, Anna (2023). Wifedom: Mrs Orwell's Invisible Life. UK: Viking. ISBN 9780241482728.
• Stansky, William; Abrahams, Peter (1994). The Unknown Orwell. Constable. ISBN 978-0-09-473460-9.
• Topp, Sylvia (2020). Eileen – The Making of George Orwell. London: Unbound. ISBN 978-1-78352-708-3.