Eileen Blair

[close] Eileen Maud Blair, née O'Shaughnessy, (1905 - 1945) was the first wife of George Orwell (Eric Arthur Blair).

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.

Eileen met Eric Blair in the spring of 1935. They married the next year, on 9 June 1936, at St Mary's Church, Wallington, Hertfordshire.

Eileen joined her husband in Spain during the Spanish Civil War. She 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 paid visits to her husband, bringing him English tea, chocolate, and cigars. By June 1937, the political situation had deteriorated and Orwell and Eileen were under threat and had to lie low. After getting their passports in order, they escaped from Spain by train, diverting to Banyuls-sur-Mer for a short stay before returning to England.

At the start of World War II, Eileen began working in the Censorship Department of the Ministry of Information in London, staying during the week with her family in Greenwich. Her brother Lawrence 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."

In spring 1942, she changed jobs to work 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 Blair, Eileen wrote of arrangements for renting and decorating Barnhill, Jura, the house where Orwell would write most of Nineteen Eighty Four - but she died before she ever saw Barnhill.