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.
Read more about this topic: Eileen O'Shaughnessy
Famous quotes containing the words early life, education and, education, early and/or life:
“... goodness is of a modest nature, easily discouraged, and when much elbowed in early life by unabashed vices, is apt to retire into extreme privacy, so that it is more easily believed in by those who construct a selfish old gentleman theoretically, than by those who form the narrower judgments based on his personal acquaintance.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“In this world, which is so plainly the antechamber of another, there are no happy men. The true division of humanity is between those who live in light and those who live in darkness. Our aim must be to diminish the number of the latter and increase the number of the former. That is why we demand education and knowledge.”
—Victor Hugo (1802–1885)
“As for the graces of expression, a great thought is never found in a mean dress; but ... the nine Muses and the three Graces will have conspired to clothe it in fit phrase. Its education has always been liberal, and its implied wit can endow a college.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“A two-year-old can be taught to curb his aggressions completely if the parents employ strong enough methods, but the achievement of such control at an early age may be bought at a price which few parents today would be willing to pay. The slow education for control demands much more parental time and patience at the beginning, but the child who learns control in this way will be the child who acquires healthy self-discipline later.”
—Selma H. Fraiberg (20th century)
“Indeed, the life of cattle, like that of many men, is but a sort of locomotiveness; they move a side at a time, and man, by his machinery, is meeting the horse and the ox half-way.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)