George Orwell’s enigmatic first wife was, it appears, an exact inversion of his second wife. Eileen O’Shaugh-nessy married an unknown writer and then worked herself to death to ensure his fame, while Sonia Brownell married a dying writer in order to ensure her own fame. The names say it all: Orwell was christened Eric Blair and Eileen therefore called herself Eileen Blair; their son, Richard, was also Blair. Sonia, however, who married Orwell on his deathbed, adopted his nom de plume and kept it even after she remarried.
We know a lot about Sonia and nothing about Eileen. Because the correspondence between herself and Orwell has not survived, Eileen has become what DJ Taylor calls “something of a black hole at the centre of Orwell studies”. Orwell’s friends found her defensive and elusive, Eileen’s friends thought her playful, untidy, and a tad malicious, and Sylvia Topp – Eileen’s first biographer – concludes from her subject’s handwriting that “she had a need for attention and sometimes put an act on to impress others with her intellect”. Eileen, however, described herself as “very much like Eric in temperament which is an asset once one has accepted the fact”. Their shared temperament might be described as stoical and combative, with a turbo-charged death-drive.
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