Eileen: Life and Letters

A review of

Eileen O’Shaughnessy, in Her Own Words

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The question sometimes asked of George Orwell, ‘How did he know?’ is perhaps answered by the person closest to him. After arriving in Spain and seeing Orwell’s wife Eileen in Barcelona in the late spring of 1937, Richard Rees noted ‘In Eileen Blair I had seen for the first time the symptoms of a human being living under a political Terror’. Orwell had been at the front in Spanish Civil War while in the rear, behind the fighting, the Stalinist suppression had begun. Eileen, who was working in the office maintained by the British Independent Labour Party (ILP), which was sympathetic to the Spanish POUM, experienced the secret police closing in long before her husband did.

The new book Eileen O’Shaughnessy, in Her Own Words is at the same time a book in a much older tradition – it is a Life and Letters volume in which Eileen’s surviving writings are placed in the appropriate place within a biography. Those writings comprise poems, letters, memoranda, and business communications. There is an enormous area mentioned which we do not have – or do not have enough knowledge to have – and that is the works (books, articles and more) on which Eileen acted as an editor, and in some cases as a re-writer. One suspects that in some cases – as ghost writers do today – works were ideas turned into completed items by Eileen. These works are completely separable from Eileen’s relation to George Orwell’s own books and articles, which co-authors and editors Angela Smith and Sylvia Topp also discuss.

Richard Rees called Eileen ‘Eileen Blair’ – that is because she had married Eric Blair in 1936. Eric Blair, of course, had adopted the pen-name ‘George Orwell’ and in her letters we find Eileen begin by talking of ‘Eric’ but move to calling him ‘George’, partly because her older brother, to whom she was close, was also known as ‘Eric’. That brother provided her with work as an editor, as she proof-read, typed and re-read the medical articles and technical translations he published. The brotherly home in Greenwich, south London, provided a refuge from the basic cottage in which the newly married Blairs lived in Hertfordshire, and later provided Eileen with a home when – after the outbreak of World War Two – Eileen took a job at the Ministry of Food, working on ‘Kitchen Front’ broadcasts, ensuring that the nation stayed healthily feed while also using the foodstuffs available. And – for reasons that remain unknown – Eileen took another name – her memoranda are signed ‘Emily Blair’. The editors print a facsimile of one such letter.

Eileen came from a professional family in the north-east, where her father was an official in the Customs service. She was bright and had a first-class education at Sunderland High School for Girls. In 1924 she matriculated at Oxford University, as other girls from her school had done and would do, and began friendships that would last her life. University education for young women was still relatively new but so soon after the First World War the studentship fell into two parts – those who returned to the University after serving in the War as nurses, ambulance drivers and so on, and those a few years younger who had spent the war years as school students. Eileen would later become a member of the Peace Pledge Union, while she seems to have been active in feminist campaigning of the time, though no woman under 30 could vote until 1928. Once married, but unlike her husband, Eileen would have had two votes. One in her home constituency and the other for the MP for Oxford University. As an autodidact Orwell did not have that second opportunity.

No woman in Eileen’s year achieved a First Class degree which would have allowed her to stay on and work towards an academic position. Eileen went into the world of work as a personal assistant, as a secretary and – after training – as a shorthand-typist. She became head of a secretarial agency, which is where much of her work must have been lost. In the mid-thirties she returned to study, taking a course in child psychology. It was through a fellow student that she was introduced to Orwell, who was then working in a bookshop as his income from novel writing failed to keep him.

Much has been written of The Stores, the cottage in which the couple began married life; the simplicity of which seems to have horrified modern commentators who ignore that Eileen had seen the house during her engagement. It is notable, too, that most people – even from middle class backgrounds – at that time expected to live in such conditions. The autobiographies of Orwell’s contemporaries and correspondents such as Desmond Hawkins (whose father had a successful electrical parts business in London, and knew Orwell via the New Statesman and at the BBC) and Geoffrey Trease (whose father was a successful wine merchant in Nottingham, and wrote to Orwell about ‘Boy’s Weeklies’ and juvenile fiction) show them living in such conditions. There was little choice. In the news in January 2026 is David Bowie’s family home in Beckenham, a London suburb, equipped with an outside toilet even as he wrote ‘Space Oddity’.

Moving on, Angela Smith and Sylvia Topp have a section specifically about Eileen, Orwell and Animal Farm. I would like, though, to draw attention to another area completely. Specifically food rationing, as in this letter from August 1942:

We must not in effect tell everyone to bake bread because of fuel. It is even doubtful whether we should advise large sandwich meals because of the bread position. Unrationed ‘process’ cheese is out, so is chocolate, and I should say sultanas. Salad on the other hand chopped cabbage and parsley as well as lettuce, should be emphasized. But a very useful story could be told about potatoes and the increased cheese ration—potato scones, potato and cheese pastry and so on to supplement the sandwiches. They take some fat but very little. Also potato pasties can be made with any kind of filling and are really very good.

What was ‘the bread position’? Another letter from the same month is explicit about the detail in a broadcast recipe:

The consumption of bread is below average—quite deliberately as the average consumption of bread must be decreased.

That is, Eileen was making herself part of the operation of the rationing process. As Topp and Smith say, she was working with high officials; a level that sometimes seems to have surprised Orwell at who she knew.

Perhaps Eileen and George listened to each other and re-wrote Animal Farm when they were in bed trying to stay warm, as Eileen put it ‘because of fuel’. Orwell, though, must have listened to Eileen, too, and her concerns. She died in 1945 – it was 1949 before he took a memory of her and—reworking it—gave it to Winston Smith:

One day a chocolate ration was issued. There had been no such issue for weeks or months past. He remembered quite clearly that precious little morsel of chocolate. It was a two-ounce slab (they still talked about ounces in those days) between the three of them.

Or the ‘increased cheese ration’. Did that reappear on Winston’s tray:

Winston and Syme pushed their trays beneath the grille. Onto each was dumped swiftly the regulation lunch—a metal pannikin of pinkish-gray stew, a hunk of bread, a cube of cheese, a mug of milkless Victory Coffee, and one saccharine tablet.

It is notable, too, that in the war years both Orwell and Eileen met their colleagues for working lunches. We have letters making such appointments in Orwell’s case, but in Eileen’s only an office memo from one colleague to another recording that ‘she looked far from well when we lunched together on Monday’. From references to a planned sick leave it seems that Eileen was in hospital for at least a week during her time at the Ministry, but where and why she was treated has left no evidence. She died during an operation, but it is not clear if this was a precursor.

Then there is the question, did Orwell know before he died that Eileen had written a poem about 1984 and published it in 1934 (the nominal grounds being the centenary of her High School: 1884, 1934, 1984)? A poem about a science fictional, fantastic future?

The Life and Letters approach adopted by Angela Smith and Sylvia Topp works really well. Perhaps the full title is misleading as it is more than the words of Eileen O’Shaughnessy. Readers should know that they will get a full life, and Eileen’s was a remarkably full life. It was, though, regrettably cut short. While she was not working alone, just look at what she did, and think what she could have done after helping Britain win the War, to make the Peace work.

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By Angela Smith and Sylvia Topp

Softcover ISBN13: 9783032033666 (Palgrave Macmillan), also available as an epublication