Eileen Blair, airbrushed out of history.

 

Eileen Blair

I've always enjoyed reading George Orwell. The novels, essays, diaries and journalism, are all worth reading. Yet, he wrote very little about his own wife, Eileen Blair, whose maiden name was Eileen O'Shaughnessy.

Eileen, was born in 1905 and came from South Shields. She studied English at Oxford University, St. Hughes, where JRR Tolkien, was one of her tutors. Although Eileen, was with her husband, George Orwell, during most of the six months he spent in Spain fighting in the civil war, she's not mentioned by name in his novel 'Homage to Catalonia'. In Homage, Orwell mentions "my wife" 37 times but never once names her.

In a recent article, "Looking for Eileen: how George Orwell wrote his wife out of his story", the author Anna Funder, points out, that you'd never know from Orwell's book nor the biographers' accounts, that Eileen worked in the headquarters of the POUM, the Spanish Marxist organisation that Orwell was fighting with, while he was serving as an infantry man in the trenches on the Aragon front. Funder, says:

"The whole time that he was fighting, Eileen was working on print and radio propaganda for the party, provisioning the men, dealing with communications, arranging the transport of medical supplies from London, lending money of her own when the party leader had none, and dodging Stalinist spies in the office and in the hotel where she lived..."

After Orwell was shot through his throat, Eileen cared for him and saved his manuscript which she'd been typing, during a two-hour-long Stalinist raid on their room. While Eileen Blair is curiously absent from her husband's writings, Anna Funder, points out that Stalin could see her perfectly clearly. As both Eileen and Orwell fled Spain to avoid being arrested by Stalin's goons, for 'Espionage & High Treason', the arrest warrant was made out in the names of "Eric Blair and his wife, Eileen Blair...Their correspondence reveals that they are rabid Trotskyites."

Despite Eileen Blair's involvement in Orwell's life, work and politics, Anna Funder, says that after devouring six brilliant biographies on George Orwell, she barely knew who Eileen Blair was, adding, it was as if history had "relegated Eileen to the private realm where she lived - and has remained...but, how is a woman made to disappear?"

Her book, "Wifedom: Mrs Orwell's Invisible Life" is published on 17th August by Viking (£20). Eileen Blair died on 29 March 1945 during an operation in Newcastle upon Tyne to remove her uterus. She was thirty-nine.