Eileen O'Shaughnessy - Marriage To Orwell

Marriage To Orwell

O'Shaughnessy met Orwell in the spring of 1935. At this moment he was living at 77 Parliament Hill in Hampstead, occupying a spare room in the first floor flat of Rosalind Henschel Obermeyer, a niece of the conductor and composer Sir George Henschel and a friend of Mabel Fierze. (Orwell would have met Mrs Obermeyer at the Fierzes, who were mutual friends). Obermeyer was pursuing an advanced course in psychology at University College, London and one evening invited some of her friends and acquaintances to a party. One "was an attractive young woman whom Rosalind did not know especially well, although they often sat next to each other at lectures: her name was Eileen O'Shaughnessy." Another was the future translator and author of memoirs Elizaveta Fen who later recalled Orwell and his friend Richard Rees, "draped" at the fireplace, looking, she thought, " moth-eaten and prematurely aged." Orwell and O'Shaughnessy married the following year, on 9 June 1936, at St Mary's in Wallington. Orwell, though a non-practising member of the Church of England, 'was sufficiently a traditionalist to wish to be married in it.' The logical end of their life at this time would have been children, but Eileen did not become pregnant and they learnt, (though not for another two years), that Eric was sterile, as he told Rayner Heppenstall, and as Eileen confided in Elizaveta Fen. Soon after their marriage she joined Orwell when he went to fight in the Spanish Civil War, returning the following year after he was wounded in the throat by a sniper.

On the outbreak of World War II, Eileen started work in the Censorship Department in London, staying during the week with her family in Greenwich. Her brother Laurence was killed by a bomb during the evacuation from Dunkirk, after which, according to Elizaveta Fen, "her grip on life, which had never been very firm, loosened considerably." In the spring of 1942, Eileen changed jobs to work at the Ministry of Food. In June 1944 Orwell and O'Shaughnessy adopted a three-week old boy they named Richard Horatio Blair.