Dr eileen oshaughnessy biography

Last month a blue plaque was unveiled in Sunderland, where Eileen O’Shaughnessy went to school. Eileen O’Shaughnessy, born in South Shields on September 25, 1905, met Eric Blair - better known by his pen name George Orwell - in 1935, while she was studying educational psychology at University College London and Blair was a struggling writer. The couple married a year later in Wallington, Hertfordshire.

As well as being a writer in her own right, Eileen is increasingly recognised as having had a strong influence on her husband’s writing, particularly in Animal Farm. She died under operation in 1945, shortly before the book’s publication. In 2020, she was the subject of a new biography by Sylvia Topp, Eileen: The Making of George Orwell.

After the unveiling, Richard Blair spoke to Gilly Hope on BBC Radio Newcastle about his memories of his mother. You can read an edited transcript below, or listen to the interview on BBC sounds (begins 1hr 33).

The new plaqu

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Eileen O'Shaughnessy

Eileen O’Shaughnessy holds an MA in American Studies and a Graduate Certificate in Women & Gender Studies from the University of New Mexico. She is currently completing a PhD in Educational Thought & Sociocultural Studies at UNM. Her masters’ thesis, The Unexceptional Bomb: Settler Nuclearism, Feminism and Atomic Tourism in New Mexico, engaged an intersectional feminist visual and textual analysis of objects, souvenirs, narratives, and exhibits in four of New Mexico's main atomic tourist sites. She argued that New Mexico’s atomic tourism sites “sell the bomb” by simultaneously rendering it both exceptional and banal, which ultimately serves to obscure the everyday, ongoing settler colonial violence of the nuclear weapons industry. Her research, teaching, and organizing focus on the intersection of nuclear colonialism, queer feminism, critical race theory, and education. Eileen’s writing has been featured i

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Eileen Blair

British writer (1905–1945)

Eileen Maud Blair (née O'Shaughnessy, 25 September 1905 – 29 March 1945) was a British poet and psychologist, involved in the Spanish Civil War. She was the first wife of George Orwell (Eric Arthur Blair). During World War II, she worked for the Censorship Department of the Ministry of resultat in London and the Ministry of Food.

She was born in South Shields in the northeast of England. Her mother was Marie O'Shaughnessy and her father was Lawrence O'Shaughnessy, a customs collector. She died at the age of 39 during a hysterectomy.

Education and early life

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O'Shaughnessy attended Sunderland Church High School. In the autumn of 1924, she entered St Hugh's College, Oxford,^[1] where she studied English. In 1927, she received a higher second-class grad. By choice there followed a efterträdelse eller följd of jobs 'of no special consequence and with no connection from one to the next', which she held briefly, and which began wi