Eileen O'Shaughnessy - Education and Early Life

Education and Early Life

It was through her brother's marriage to Gwen Hunton that she and Orwell had access to Greystone, near Carlton, where they stayed in 1944/45. Greystone had recently been left vacant following the death of Gwen's maiden aunt, Mary Hunton.

She attended Sunderland Church High School. In the autumn of 1924, she entered St Hugh's College, Oxford, one of the women's colleges at Oxford, where she read English. In 1927 she received a very good Second. 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 sceretary; 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. Further, she helped her brother Laurence, by typing, proof-reading and editing his scientific papers and books.

In the autumn of 1934 she enrolled at University College, London, in a two-year graduate course programme in Educational Psychology, that would have led to her MA degree. She was particularly attracted to intelligence-testing in children "and quite early decided upon that as the subject for the thesis she would be writing." Elizaveta Fen, a fellow student who would become one of Eileen'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 ... "

O'Shaughnessy was also an amateur poet.