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 education and, education, early and/or life:
“The Cairo conference ... is about a complicated web of education and employment, consumption and poverty, development and health care. It is also about whether governments will follow where women have so clearly led them, toward safe, simple and reliable choices in family planning. While Cairo crackles with conflict, in the homes of the world the orthodoxies have been duly heard, and roundly ignored.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)
“The Cairo conference ... is about a complicated web of education and employment, consumption and poverty, development and health care. It is also about whether governments will follow where women have so clearly led them, toward safe, simple and reliable choices in family planning. While Cairo crackles with conflict, in the homes of the world the orthodoxies have been duly heard, and roundly ignored.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)
“...to many a mother’s heart has come the disappointment of a loss of power, a limitation of influence when early manhood takes the boy from the home, or when even before that time, in school, or where he touches the great world and begins to be bewildered with its controversies, trade and economics and politics make their imprint even while his lips are dewy with his mother’s kiss.”
—J. Ellen Foster (1840–1910)
“But that beginning was wiped out in fear
The day I swung suspended with the grapes,
And was come after like Eurydice
And brought down safely from the upper regions;
And the life I live now’s an extra life
I can waste as I please on whom I please.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)