Eileen 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 operation. 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 it down she took up freelance journalism, selling an occasional feature piece to the Evening News. She also 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 qualification. 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 then for the first time: "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 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." Elizaveta Fen recalled Orwell in her memoirs, Orwell and his friend