After I had pieced together Eileen’s time in Spain I still puzzled over how I could have read Homage to Catalonia twice before and never understood she was there. Eileen had worked at the political headquarters, visited him at the front, cared for him when wounded, saved Orwell’s manuscript by giving it to McNair, saved the passports, saved Orwell from almost certain arrest at the hotel, and somehow got the visas to save them all. How is it that she remains invisible? I scanned through the electronic text of the book. Orwell mentions ‘my wife’ thirty-seven times. And then I see: not once is
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