Born: 25 September 1905, United Kingdom
Died: 29 March 1945
Country most active: United Kingdom, Spain
Also known as: Eileen O’Shaughnessy, Emily Blair
This person is also featured in Infinite Women creator Allison Tyra’s book Uncredited: Women’s Overlooked, Misattributed, and Stolen Work.
Poet and psychologist Eileen Blair was so much more than the wife of Goerge Orwell. In addition to being his unofficial editor, her work influenced his, including Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, the latter of which was likely named for her poem End of the Century, 1984.
Blair attended Oxford in the 1920s, just a few years after the university finally started granting women degrees. She volunteered with the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification during the Spanish Civil War, later helping her injured husband escape the country. Back in London, she worked in the Censorship Department of the Ministry of Information, and later the Ministry of Food during World War II. She lived for years with a chronic medical condition, possibly endometriosis, before dying in 1945 during a hysterectomy procedure.