Eileen Maud Blair (née O'Shaughnessy, 25 September 1905 – 29 March 1945) was a British poet and psychologist, involved in the Spanish Civil War.

[2] 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 secretary; a reader for the elderly Dame Elizabeth Cadbury; and the proprietor of an office in Victoria Street, London, for typing and secretarial work.

She helped her brother, Laurence, a thoracic surgeon, by typing, proofreading, and editing his scientific papers and books.

[3][4] In the autumn of 1934, Eileen enrolled at University College London for a two-year graduate course in educational psychology, leading to a Master of Arts.

Rosalind Obermeyer was taking an advanced course in psychology at University College London; one evening she invited some of her friends and acquaintances to a party.

In her memoirs, Elizaveta Fen recalled Orwell and his friend and mentor Richard Rees "draped" at the fireplace, looking, she thought, "moth-eaten and prematurely aged.

"[12] Eileen also worked in the propaganda department, producing the ILP's newspaper and radio show with Charles Orr.

He describes how Stalin's agents, once they gained control of the police, imprisoned or murdered several of his and Eileen's friends or colleagues.

Realizing that their cause had been sabotaged, Orwell, together with McNair and another ex soldier from POUM's ILP contingent, Stafford Cottman slept "rough" to avoid arrest,[16] while scrambling to get their passports and exit documents in order.

Myers and Tyrell recognise that in Homage to Catalonia, Orwell disguised Eileen's role in the ILP, and suppressed her name, implying that she was there simply as a supportive spouse.

[26] Myers writes[27] after being convicted of treason and condemned to death, he feared he could be murdered by Soviet agents whom he knew were operating in England, and wanted to protect Eileen from dangerous reprisals by hiding her connection to POUM.

Funder recognises that Eileen retyped drafts of Orwell's book,[28] and knew how she was described in it; but suggests that she was powerless to oppose his "patriarchal" reluctance to record her achievements.

Funder concedes that George and Eileen were named in 1937 on a Stalinist verdict, which alleged they were both "ILP liaison agents of POUM";[29] that they believed by 1940 that there was also a Nazi arrest-list of British leftwing intellectuals in the event of a Nazi or fascist government being installed in Britain;[30] and that Orwell remained very nervous of Stalinist assassination attempts even after reaching Britain.

Topp was talking of Eileen's courage in assisting Orwell and his comrades to avoid probable arrest on the train from Barcelona.

She did this by travelling with them, and helping them to seem not a group of soldiers escaping the war but a mixed party of rich British tourists.

However, after the success of his 1949 book Nineteen Eighty-Four, it was rediscovered, praised, and widely read,[35] making it regrettable that within Homage to Catalonia Eileen does not emerge more vividly.

At the start of World War II, Eileen began working in the Censorship Department of the Ministry of Information in London, and stayed during the week with her family in Greenwich.

[36] Eileen's brother, Laurence, was killed by a bomb during the evacuation from Dunkirk,[37] after which, according to Elizaveta Fen, "her grip on life, which had never been very firm, loosened considerably".

Gwen evacuated her children to the location when the "flying-bomb" raids began, and Richard went there when the Blairs had been bombed out of their flat in Maida Vale in June 1944.

[40] In 1945 she booked herself for a hysterectomy with Dr Harvey Evers, against the advice of London doctors, who, because Eileen was anaemic, would operate only after a month of blood transfusions.

In the words of the inquest: "Cardiac failure whilst under anaesthetic of ether and chloroform skilfully and properly administered for operation for removal of uterus.

[43] Eileen and Richard had been living at Greystone at the time, with Orwell working in Paris as a war correspondent for The Observer.