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Eileen Maud Blair (née O'Shaughnessy, 25 September 1905 – 29 March 1945) was a British poet and psychologist. She was the first wife of Eric Arthur Blair, commonly known as the English author George Orwell. During the Spanish Civil War in 1937, she volunteered as an English-French typist for the Independent Labour Party leader John McNair while Orwell was fighting with the POUM. When the POUM was declared illegal, she helped her husband escape from Spain.
Blair supported Orwell as a typist, collaborator and critic of his works. She was left in charge of his manuscript for his novel The Road to Wigan Pier in 1937, when Orwell left to fight in the Spanish Civil War. During World War II, she worked for the Censorship Department of the Ministry of Information in London and the Minister of Food.
After living with a condition of the uterus for years, Blair booked an operation for a hysterectomy and died during surgery at the age of 39, while Orwell was working away on an assignment in Europe. Biographers have credited her with being influential on Orwell's work, including his 1945 novella Animal Farm. Her poem titled "End of the Century, 1984", which was published in 1934, the year before she met Orwell, foreshadowed his 1949 dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Blair attended Sunderland Church High School. In the autumn of 1924, she entered St Hugh's College, Oxford, where she studied English literature. In 1927, she received a higher second-class degree. She was extremely disappointed to not achieve a first class degree. At the time, female students were a small minority, as the university had allowed women to graduate only four years earlier. She held a succession of brief jobs, beginning as an assistant mistress at Silchester House, a girls' boarding school in Taplow in the Thames valley. She also worked as a secretary; a reader for the elderly Dame Elizabeth Cadbury; and was 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, by typing, proofreading and editing his scientific papers and books.
In the autumn of 1934, Blair enrolled at University College London for a two-year postgraduate course in educational psychology, leading to a Master of Arts. She was particularly interested in testing intelligence in children and chose it as the subject for the thesis. Her faculty was led by Sir Cyril Burt, who was impressed by her abilities. Elizaveta Fen (pen name of Lydia Jackson Jiburtovich), a fellow student who became one of her closest friends, met her for the first time at University College when Blair was 28 years old. She described her as "tall and slender", with blue eyes and dark brown, naturally wavy hair.
They married the next year, on 9 June 1936, at St Mary's Church, Wallington, Hertfordshire. Their first home was a cottage at Number 2, Kit's Lane, Wallington, known as "The Stores", where they lived until 1940. It was in a much poorer condition than the home in which she was raised. The cottage was small, damp, remote and lacked modern facilities. It also served as the village store, so Blair settled into married life by cooking and selling groceries while her husband was busy writing. In a letter from November 1936, she wrote that she argued continuously with Orwell in the first few weeks of marriage, which was partially the result of Orwell's aunt Nellie Limouzin staying for two months in the spare bedroom. Blair wrote that her husband's family had warned her prior to marriage that he was "impossible to live with" but she noted that they failed to understand that she had a similar temperament. They wanted children, but Blair did not become pregnant, and they learned later that Orwell was sterile.
Due to moving to Wallington, Blair was unable to complete her coursework for her psychology degree as she needed more school children for her research than were living in the village. She was content for their married life to revolve around Orwell's writing. She used her typing skills to help type her husband's manuscripts and critiqued his work. Friends credited her with improving Orwell's writing and he later said that she could have been a writer in her own right. Lettice Cooper wrote that there was more "light and colour in his writing". Richard Rees also noticed a "striking change of mood" in his writing in 1936. Although Blair challenged Orwell's beliefs, a friend noted that they worked well together. On 23 December 1936, Orwell announced that he was leaving for the Spanish Civil War and left his wife in charge of his unpublished book The Road to Wigan Pier. He told his agent that his wife had authority to make any changes to the manuscript on his behalf and she did so before deciding to join him in Spain.
Letters written by Orwell suggest that the Blairs had an open marriage. Orwell pursued Blair's friend, Lydia Jackson, and also a friend named Inez Holden, two romantic interests that he concealed from his wife. Blair also displayed interest in Georges Kopp, Orwell's commander in the Spanish Civil War.
Charles Orr, McNair's assistant, described her as "friendly, gregarious and unpretentious", unlike her socially awkward husband. While assisting Orr, Blair also managed the affairs and finances of the ILP contingent. Orr was impressed by Blair's secretarial skills and also her admiration of Orwell, stating that she could not stop talking about him. He felt that Orwell needed a social extrovert to help him communicate with others.
In mid-March, Blair convinced Kopp to take her to visit Orwell on the front. She stayed with him for three days and had her photo taken with the volunteers in the trenches. At night she stayed with Orwell in farmhouse outbuildings. She found the experience of witnessing the bombardment to be interesting and enjoyable. After the visit, Orwell wrote to her to thank her for bringing him supplies, describing her as a "wonderful wife". Blair had several admirers at the ILP, including David Wickes, an interpreter and spy for the Comintern, and Kopp, though it is unknown if she responded to their interest.
After several weeks at the front, Orwell was hospitalised for ten days with a poisoned hand. He returned to the front and near the end of April returned to Blair in Barcelona on leave. He had arrived in the time of the street battles that occurred during the May Days. After the street fighting stopped, he returned to the front.
The internal fighting between Republican forces resulted in an atmosphere of suspicion and paranoia in Barcelona. The ILP office was one of several suspect groups under surveillance with reports drawn up by the International Brigades’ branch of the military intelligence service, led by members of the Comintern. Both Orwell and Blair were being watched. While Orwell was away at the front, several volunteer friends were imprisoned.
On 20 May, a bullet hit Orwell in the neck and Blair had him transferred to a hospital in Barcelona. On 16 June, the POUM was accused of collaborating with the enemy and made illegal. Orwell's notes were confiscated by six plain-clothed policemen in a late night visit to Blair. She was able to obtain Orwell's travel documents while he was in hiding, likely saving his life.
On 15 June 1937, they escaped from Barcelona by train to the French border, disguising themselves as a tourist party. In France, the Orwells diverted to Banyuls-sur-Mer for a short stay and returned to England.
At the start of World War II, Blair began working in the Censorship Department of the Ministry of Information in London. The office where she worked was in Senate House, a 19-story stone building that Orwell used as his inspiration for the Ministry of Truth in Nineteen Eighty-Four. She stayed during the week with her family in Greenwich. She was the main breadwinner at this time. The Blairs had moved back to London for the convenience of their work, initially living in a flat at Dorset Chambers in Chagford Street, followed by Langford Court in Langford Place off Abbey Road. They then moved to 10 Mortimer Crescent, in Kilburn.
In May 1940, her brother, Laurence, was killed by a bomb during the Operation Dynamo 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 Minister of Food. During this time, she was commonly known as "Emily Blair". Later in the 1980s, her friend Lettice Cooper commented, "I find it difficult now to remember her as Eileen".
On 14 May 1944, the Blairs adopted a three-week-old boy, whom they named Richard Horatio Blair. David Astor thought they were "renewing their marriage round their new child". In June 1944, their flat in Mortimer Crescent was destroyed by a flying bomb, so they moved to a top-floor flat at 27 Canonbury Square, Islington, where Blair helped Orwell as he finished writing Animal Farm.
At the end of World War II, in February 1945, Orwell was sent to Paris as a war correspondent for The Observer and The Manchester Evening News. Blair and Richard went to live in Greystone House near Stockton-on-Tees with her sister-in-law Gwen O'Shaughnessy. In one of her last letters to Orwell, she wrote of arrangements for renting and decorating Barnhill, Jura, the house where Orwell wrote most of Nineteen Eighty-Four, but she died without seeing it.
Several biographers and friends have commented that Orwell's writing was enhanced after meeting his wife. Bernard Crick wrote that it "improved greatly after meeting Eileen, becoming a settled, simplified and consistent style". Peter Stansky and William Abrahams remarked on an "uncramped expression of feeling, a generosity and humaneness" in " Shooting an Elephant" that had previously been absent in Orwell's work and attributed it partly to Blair's influence. Gordon Bowker wrote that key ideas in Orwell's later works from The Road to Wigan Pier onwards likely resulted from the "intellectual stimulus" in his marriage. Lydia Jackson commented that Blair's "logic, her feeling for accuracy in the use of words influenced Orwell, perhaps without his being aware of it, in improving his style of writing, which in earlier years had a certain crudity and calculated exaggeration, detracting from its power to carry conviction". Tosco Fyvel gave credit to "the conversational influence of Eileen and the light touch of her bright, humorous intelligence".
Blair collaborated with Orwell indirectly on Animal Farm. Orwell originally planned to write an essay, but she suggested a fable. They worked on it together in the evenings and their friends said they could see her style and humour in the novel. Orwell wrote of his wife, "It's a terrible shame that Eileen didn't live to see the publication of Animal Farm, which she was particularly fond of and even helped in the planning of." Blair's son, Richard, recognised his mother's input in Animal Farm: "it’s a completely different book. It’s got a light touch to it." He considered Blair to be an intellectual match for Orwell, commenting that she was "well educated, quite the equal to my father in terms of intellectual capacity". In March 2022, a blue plaque displaying her birth name was unveiled at Westgate House, Beach Road, her former childhood home, in honour of Blair and her influence on Orwell's work. A blue plaque was also installed at her former school, Sunderland Church High School in February 2023.
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