32 Facts About Eileen Blair

Eileen Maud Blair was a British poet and psychologist, involved in the Spanish Civil War.

Eileen Blair was the first wife of George Orwell.

Eileen Blair was born in South Shields in the northeast of England.

Eileen Blair's mother was Marie O'Shaughnessy and her father was Lawrence O'Shaughnessy, a customs collector.

Eileen Blair died at the age of 39 during a hysterectomy.

Eileen Blair helped her brother, Laurence, a thoracic surgeon, by typing, proofreading, and editing his scientific papers and books.

Eileen Blair was particularly interested in testing intelligence in children "and quite early decided upon that as the subject for the thesis she would be writing".

Eileen Blair was tall and slender, her shoulders rather broad and high.

Eileen Blair had blue eyes and dark brown, naturally wavy hair.

Eileen Blair 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".

At the time Eileen 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.

Eileen Blair joined Orwell in Spain in early 1937 during the Spanish Civil War.

Eileen Blair 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.

Orwell was posted to the front, while Eileen Blair worked in Barcelona as a "French-English shorthand typist".

Eileen Blair describes how Stalin's agents, once they gained control of the police, imprisoned or murdered several of his and Eileen's friends or colleagues.

Eileen Blair says that she believed she was being watched as a "decoy duck", to catch her husband.

Eileen Blair 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.

Funder concedes that George and Eileen Blair 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 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.

Eileen Blair 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.

At the start of World War II, Eileen Blair began working in the Censorship Department of the Ministry of Information in London, and stayed during the week with her family in Greenwich.

Eileen Blair was the main breadwinner for the Orwells at this time.

Eileen Blair was increasingly unwell from uterine bleeding and left her job at the Ministry of Information in 1941.

In one of her last letters to Eric, Eileen Blair 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.

In early 1945, Eileen Blair was in very poor health and went to stay there.

Joyce Pritchard, the O'Shaughnessys' nanny, said that Eileen Blair had visited Greystone frequently between July 1944 and March 1945.

Eileen Blair 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 Blair was anaemic, would operate only after a month of blood transfusions.

Eileen Blair died on 29 March 1945 in Newcastle upon Tyne under anesthetic.

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

Some scholars believe that Eileen Blair had a large influence on Orwell's writing.

Anna Funder argues that Eileen Blair collaborated with Orwell "in a subtle, indirect way" on Animal Farm.

Orwell originally planned to write an essay, but Eileen Blair suggested a fable.