Eileen Blair

Eileen Maud Blair (née O'Shaughnessy, 25 September 1905 – 29 March 1945) was a British poet and psychologist. She was the first wife of Eric Arthur Blair, commonly known as the English author George Orwell. During the Spanish Civil War in 1937, she volunteered as an English-French typist for the Independent Labour Party leader John McNair while Orwell was fighting with the POUM. When the POUM was declared illegal, she helped her husband escape from Spain. Blair supported Orwell as a typist, collaborator and critic of his works. She was left in charge of his manuscript for his novel The Road to Wigan Pier in 1937, when Orwell left to fight in the Spanish Civil War. During World War II, she worked for the Censorship Department of the Ministry of Information in London and the Minister of Food. After living with a condition of the uterus for years, Blair booked an operation for a hysterectomy and died during surgery at the age of 39, while Orwell was working away on an assignment in Europe. Biographers have credited her with being influential on Orwell's work, including his 1945 novella Animal Farm. Her poem titled "End of the Century, 1984", which was published in 1934, the year before she met Orwell, foreshadowed his 1949 dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.