Significant Others - Eileen Blair

Episode Date: March 20, 2024

George Orwell has never been accused of being a feminist. And yet his wife Eileen left her mark on his most important works.Starring Sally Drexler as Eileen Blair and Nigel Daly as George OrwellAlso featuring: Ben Partridge, Luke Millington-Drake, Thom Wickes, Amelia Chappelow, and Colin Anderson. Source List:Eileen: The Making of George Orwell by Sylvia Topp, © 2020 Wifedom: Mrs. Orwell’s Invisible Life by Anna Funder, © 2023Orwell: The Life by D.J. Taylor, © 2003, Published 2015 by Open Road Integrated MediaOrwell: The New Life by D.J. Taylor, © 2023, Published by Pegasus Books, Ltd1984 & Coming Up For Air by George Orwell, © 2021 by True Sign1984 & Animal Farm by George Orwell, © 2022, Sanage PublishingThe Guardian, Looking for Eileen: how George Orwell wrote his wife out of his storyThe New York Times, One Biography Questions Orwell’s Image, and Another Brings His First Wife Into FocusNew Humanist, Eric, Eileen and NorahThe American Scholar, Down and OutThe Guardian, Orwell by DJ Taylor Review - A Very English SocialistThe Orwell Foundation, Remembering Eileen: An Interview with George Orwell’s Son, Richard BlairThe New York Times, How ‘Orwellian’ Became an All-Purpose InsultOnline Etymology Dictionary, OrwellianThe Sydney Morning Herald, The Mysterious Absence of George Orwell’s First WifeThe Guardian, Another Piece of the PuzzleThe Orwell Society, Eileen - and Orwell’s Shifting Attitudes on Gender IssuesThe New Yorker, Honest, Decent, WrongThe Article, In Defense of George Orwell

Welcome to Significant Others. I'm Liza Powell O'Brien, and today we're telling the story of a woman whose character was so invisible to historians that when it was finally revealed, her famous husband's biography had to be completely rewritten. This time on Significant Others, meet Eileen Blair. George Orwell routinely ranks in the top ten of Britain's most important writers, and his work was influential enough to have spawned an adjective all its own. The word Orwellian has been deployed in recent years to describe everything from American politics on the right to American politics on the left. And it seems to pop up in headlines at a rate of about once a month these days. But in spite of the fact that everyone on the internet thinks they know enough about Orwell and his worldview to invoke him as a signpost for social sanity or the lack thereof, and despite the fact that he has been so thoroughly biographized

that the same acquaintance of his was contacted over the years by no fewer than eight different writers. There existed, until recently, a relative mystery at the heart of Orwell's life story, his first wife, Eileen. Everyone knew Eileen existed, they just didn't know much else about her. Partly because both she and Orwell opted not to save their correspondence, partly because she died suddenly and young,

and also because Orwell seems to have had very little interest in observing her on the page. As DJ Taylor writes in his book, Orwell, The Life, one could read Orwell's account of the time he and Eileen spent in Morocco without ever realizing that another person was there. Taylor, in that first biography, scraped the sides of the barrel for details of Eileen's reality, calling friends' comments about her sincere but unrevealing, and bemoaning the fact that the most he could get out of Orwell on the subject of Eileen was his comment in a letter to a friend that she was nice.

Eileen remained a frustrating enigma, having left behind, it seemed, nothing but a few letters full of what Taylor calls wit, affection, and exuberance. The sum total of Eileen in that book, which was published in 2003, was that she was a bright, spirited woman who had given up her master's degree for a life spent selling shillings worth of groceries and watching her husband type. There was so much more we wanted to know about her, but as Taylor puts it, in the retrospective glare of Orwell's reputation, Eileen never quite exists in her own right. But that has changed. In 2005, a cache of letters came to light,

which were written by Eileen to her friend Nora. And they threw not only new light onto Eileen, but onto Orwell himself, to such a degree that Taylor decided to write an entirely new biography of his favorite subject, this one entitled Orwell, The New Life. The letters also inspired a proper biography of Eileen, written by Sylvia Topp, to which I am deeply indebted for this episode. The first thing to know, if you don't already, is that George Orwell's real name was Eric Blair, so Eileen, when she married him, became Eileen Blair. But her husband will be George Orwell for us, just to keep things a little simpler. In 2023, a plaque was put up in a small town in England, which reads, Eileen Maud O'Shaughnessy Blair, 1905-1945,

to 1945, poet, journalist, editor, married Eric Blair slash George Orwell in 1936 and influenced his most famous works. So just what was this influence and who was the woman who wielded it? Eileen O'Shaughnessy was born to a highly literate family in South Shields, England. was born to a highly literate family in South Shields, England. She won more awards than anyone else in her high school graduating class, and from there went on to Oxford University in 1924, just a few years after they started allowing their female students to earn degrees. At Oxford, she audited a class with C.S. Lewis and had as one of her advisors, Lewis's friend J.R.R. Tolkien. After graduation, she held a series of jobs that made use of her superlative shorthand and editing skills,

including helping her brother Eric, a thoracic surgeon, in the writing of a medical book about the treatment of tuberculosis, a point which will acquire ironic weight in a little bit. of tuberculosis, a point which will acquire ironic weight in a little bit. In another of her jobs, she led what she called a revolt of the oppressed against a toxic boss. And then finally, she decided to go for a master's in psychology. In 1935, she attended a party hosted by a friend from school who happened to be the flatmate of a young novelist. The minute he saw Eileen, he made a beeline for her. Now that is the kind of girl I would like to marry. George Orwell said, after talking with her all night.

Even though, according to Eileen, she was... Rather drunk, behaving my worst, very rowdy. Rowdy is, of course, a relative term, and by all accounts, Eileen's behavior that night amounted to nothing more than drinking and cracking jokes. She let the tall, lanky author flirt with her all night, and then went home and started reading one of his books. Most likely, it has been posited on his recommendation.

Soon after that, she agreed to meet him for dinner, and within a few weeks, they were engaged. Orwell was not slowed down by the fact that he already had a friends-with-benefits situation going on with a woman named Kay Ekvall, with whom he would meet up during the week. Eileen was for Sundays, and poor Kay did get dumped by the time the wedding rolled around. But the wedding didn't happen right away. When Orwell proposed, Eileen had just finished the first year of her master's program, and she wanted to wait until after she earned her degree to get married. This would also give Orwell some time to earn money. This would also give Orwell some time to earn money. Also,

It was Orwell's dream to live, as he called it, in other words, on a self-sustaining farm. With Eileen's help, he discovered what seemed like the perfect place. I'm arranging to take a cottage at Wallington near Baldock in Harts. Rather a pig in a poke, because I've never seen it. But I'm trusting the friends who have chosen it for me, and it is very cheap. The cottage was somewhat remote, extremely rustic and old, with no electricity, an overly sensitive cesspool, a leaky fireplace, and a corrugated tin roof over some rotting thatch that made a crazy racket in a rainstorm.

The front door was not more than four and a half feet high. Orwell himself was well over six feet, was not more than four and a half feet high, Orwell himself was well over six feet, but there was enough of a yard to grow vegetables and raise chickens and goats, so to Orwell it was just right. He moved in first, and Eileen joined him after the wedding, intending to complete her master's thesis and finalize her degree. But the scope of daily work at the cottage would turn out to make that impossible. Five months later, Eileen wrote the following letter to her friend Nora. I lost my habit of punctual correspondence during the first few weeks of marriage because we quarreled so continuously and really bitterly that I thought I'd save time and just write one letter to everyone

when the murder or separation had been accomplished. The letter is long and rambling and a joy to read. She goes on to talk about how she'd been crying all the time. She claimed it's because her mother drove her to exhaustion the week before the wedding, and then Orwell's aunt came to stay with them for two months, but also that her husband decided that he mustn't let his work be interrupted and complained bitterly when we'd been married a week

that he'd only done two good days' work out of seven. He was on deadline when they got married and turned in his iconic essay, Shooting an Elephant, just three days after the ceremony. To add to Eileen's troubles, she said she couldn't make the old oven cook anything but boiled eggs, which made her sick, and that he had his bronchitis for three weeks in July, and it rained every day for six weeks, during the whole of which the kitchen was flooded, and all food went moldy in a few hours. It seems a long time ago now, but then

seemed very permanent. What Eileen called Orwell's bronchitis was actually a lifelong, occasionally debilitating and ultimately fatal lung condition. The illness made him even more dependent on her than he might otherwise have been. She said she wished she could travel more, but that Orwell... Always gets something if I'm going away if he has notice of the fact. And if he has no notice, he gets something when I've gone, so that I have to come home again. On top of that, they were seriously strapped for cash, and her new in-laws found her entirely mad to have decided to marry their dear Orwell in the first place. On the wedding day, Mrs. Blair shook her head and said that I'd be a brave

girl if I knew what I was in for. And Avril, the sister, said that obviously I didn't know what I was in for or I shouldn't be there. They haven't, I think, grasped that I am very much like him in temperament, which is an asset once one has accepted the fact. She signed the letter, Pig. It was a nickname from their college days, possibly inspired by a part Eileen played on stage at one point. But flashing forward to one of Orwell's best-known novels,

it's impossible not to notice who was chosen to represent the dangerously clever Bolsheviks. The pigs now revealed that during the past three months they had taught themselves to read and write. As the newlywed Eileen was awash in tears, struggling to find her way in both a ramshackle cottage and a marriage to a difficult man, and saying goodbye to her master's degree, Orwell was as close to bliss as he would ever get. His longtime friend Jeffrey Gorer said he thought that first year with Eileen was the happiest of 1936 as hitler and mussolini and franco were gathering strength and spain was headed towards civil war orwell this fascism, somebody's got to stop it. That somebody, apparently, was him. So he headed off in a blue suit and tie, his size 12 boots slung over his shoulder, to make himself useful to the Spanish socialists. Leaving Eileen at the

cottage to milk the goats, feed the pigs, mind the store, liaise with her husband's literary agents, and tell his mother that the Blair family's silver they had hawked for travel money was simply out for engraving. On his way to the front, he famously visited Henry Miller in Paris, whose work he had praised in a review. Miller, who thought what Orwell was doing was idiotic, but did not succeed in dissuading him from doing it, rounded out his war uniform with a more substantial jacket, made either of corduroy or leather, depending on who you ask. Within a matter of weeks, Eileen decided that being the only human on a working farm was less appealing than living in an actual war zone. In an undated letter to Nora, likely written mid-February 1937,

she announces her decision to join her husband in Spain, saying, By the way, I suppose I told you George was in the Spanish militia? I can't remember. She found work as a typist for the leader of the Independent Labour Party in Spain, but wrote, If Franco had engaged me as a manicurist, I would have agreed to that too. The four months Aileen spent in Barcelona certainly sound more entertaining than slopping a bunch of pigs. She was wooed by Russian spies, one of whom ended up liking her so much he may have protected her from arrest, and managed to make Orwell's commander, George Kopp, fall head over heels in love with her.

Orwell, for his part, was at the front not doing much fighting, since neither side could afford artillery, and apparently spent most of his time making tea in the dugout, chain-smoking, and shooting at rats, until the day the enemy landed a shot through his neck. When it happened, he said what went through his mind was, This ought to please my wife, I thought, as she has always wanted me to be wounded, which would save me from being killed.

Rendered physically useless to the cause, Orwell decided to head home with Eileen to England as soon as possible. But first, they had to get out of Spain. Barcelona was falling to the fascists, Russia had declared Orwell's anti-fascist group illegal, and his boss George Kopp had been arrested. While Orwell tried to hack through the quickly unraveling spools of red tape trekking from field office to field office to get signatures for his honorable discharge, Aileen stayed in Barcelona, certain she was being watched. Waiting for her husband to return, but knowing that she was, in doing so,

acting as bait for their enemies, took its toll. Their friend, the editor and writer Richard Rees, newly arrived as a volunteer ambulance driver, found her absent-minded, preoccupied, and dazed. Later, he wrote, In Eileen Blair, I had seen for the first time the symptoms of a human being living under a political terror. For five days, she waited for her husband to return so she could help him run for his life, while trying to seem as if she didn't have a care in the world. When he finally walked into the hotel lobby, she intercepted him immediately. She got up and came towards me in what struck me as a very unconcerned manner.

And she put an arm around my neck and, with a sweet smile for the benefit of the other people in the lounge, hissed in my ear, Get out! They scattered. She stayed in the hotel room and waited for their travel papers to come through. Meanwhile, Orwell slept in graveyards and churches around the city so as to stay under the radar. Eventually, they made it onto a train out of Catalonia, dodging the random Spanish police searches by posing as innocuous British travelers. Orwell hid behind a book of Wordsworth poems, and Eileen provided helpful cover, since the police were generally not on the lookout for

female anti-fascists. Thanks, misogyny. Once they were safely home, they set to work cleaning up the farm, which had gone almost to ruin in their absence. And Orwell got back to his insanely prolific writing schedule of a book a year, plus countless reviews and essays. They adopted a poodle they called Marx, a name which apparently functioned as a sort of litmus test for guests who, depending on their frame of reference, would think it was named either after a department store, a revolutionary, or a comedian. Eileen joked, We called him Marx to remind us that we had never read Marx, and now we have read a little and taken so strong a personal dislike to the man that we can't look the dog in the face when we speak to him. disliked the man that we can't look the dog in the face when we speak to him.

Orwell finished writing the still incisive Homage to Catalonia in January 1938. In March, he took to his bed with a cold and then started hemorrhaging out of his mouth, something which had happened before but which Eileen had not yet witnessed. He downplayed its seriousness, but when it happened again a week later and showed no signs of stopping, the terrified Eileen reached out to her brother Eric, the surgeon, and got her husband transported to a sanatorium, likely saving his life. He stayed there for four months,

during which time Eileen handled everything at the cottage and with agents and publishers, including extra typing work to earn money and long bus rides to visit him. Once he was feeling better, they began planning a move to Morocco on the advice of Eileen's brother, who thought the climate there might be good for Orwell's condition. But the climate in Morocco did not turn out to be a cure-all. Eileen wrote while they were there, I think we shan't die of it, which until recently seemed probable in my case and certain in his. He has been worse here than I've ever seen him. For the whole of their life together, Orwell's illness would take center stage.

He routinely coughed up blood and pushed his ailing body to its limits while ingesting a steady stream of particularly strong tobacco smoke. Ultimately, tuberculosis would kill him in 1950 at the age of 46. But he was not the only member of their household who was unwell, though Eileen tried to keep reports of her condition lighthearted. Orwell was ill and in bed for more than a week, and as soon as he was better, I had an illness I'd actually started before his, but had necessarily postponed. I enjoyed my illness. I had to do all the cooking as usual,

but I did it in a dressing gown and firmly carried the tray back to my bed. There were times when the seriousness of her trouble broke through even Orwell's narcissistic gaze. 12 December. Eileen has neuralgia, probably owing to going out in the rain yesterday. But her infirmity was not the fault of her actions. It was caused by ovarian cysts, which brought stabbing pain, fever, and copious amounts of blood. While they were in Morocco, she was stuck in bed for so long she finally went to the doctor. Too sick to ride her bike, their usual form of transit, she took a taxi to Marrakesh for an x-ray, she took a taxi to Marrakesh for an x-ray, writing that she and Orwell both suspected she had another ovarian cyst,

though there is no written mention of a previous one. And yet, amongst all these troubles, plus Orwell's own serious and persistent bouts of infirmity during their stay in Morocco, he was able to write, with her assistance, Coming Up for Air, which has been called his most light-hearted, hopeful, and humorous work, descriptors which can be seen as signs of Eileen's influence. As England went to war in the fall of 1939, Eileen went to work, in a job at the Press and Censorship Bureau in the Ministry of Information Information in an office building that resembled almost exactly the Ministry of Truth from 1984.

An enormous, pyramidal structure of glittering white concrete, soaring up terrace after terrace, 300 meters into the air. Toward the end of 1940, she wrote Nora a letter that said, I have been ill, ever so ill, bedridden for four weeks and still weak. They diagnosed cystitis and then they diagnosed nephrolithiasis. And then they diagnosed mortar fever with ovarian complications. And then they went all hush hush while they diagnosed a tuberculous infection so that I couldn't possibly guess what they were testing for. They haven't yet diagnosed cancer or general paralysis of the insane,

but I expect they will shortly. They're in a great worry because nothing can be found wrong with my heart, as that was assumed to be giving out very soon. The conjecture now is that Eileen may have been suffering from endometriosis, but Orwell blamed her job for her poor health and finally convinced her to quit. After a while, she got another job doing public relations for the Ministry of Food, and biographer Sylvia Topp posits that her decision to promote Indian recipes during the ration contributed to the enduring popularity of curries in England. In 1943, Orwell announced that he wanted to move to Jura, a Scottish island so remote it made Wallington look like a metropolis.

But first, he wanted to expand their family. but first he wanted to expand their family. He and Eileen had always wanted a son, but they were unable to conceive a child together, possibly because of her condition and also maybe a long suspected sterility on his part. And so in 1944, they adopted a baby boy. Eileen retrieved the child by herself and brought him home to their flat as the bombs fell all around them. In 1945, Orwell accepted an assignment to cover the war from inside Europe. Eileen had no objection to his leaving, even though her strength was failing to the point that she could no longer carry their son up the stairs to their apartment. She didn't mention to her husband that her body had become practically non-functional because, as she wrote to him, I wanted you to go away peacefully. She also put off meeting with a

cancer doctor because, with Orwell gone, she was the only one who could attend the hearing with the judge to finalize the adoption. Friends of hers who became aware of the extent of her pain, bleeding, and debilitation wanted to send for Orwell to come home, but that suggestion horrified Eileen. Instead, she wrote him a telegram, in essence, asking his permission to have the hysterectomy her doctor said was necessary, and which her husband had previously opposed, perhaps because it would have closed the door on the hope of her ever carrying his child. perhaps because it would have closed the door on the hope of her ever carrying his child. I had a phase of thinking that it was really outrageous to spend all your money on an operation, of which I know you disapprove. Especially because, she said,

I really don't think I'm worth the money. Her doctors recommended a full month of blood transfusions before the operation, but she waived this recommendation off in favor of a speedier, more affordable surgery. Her fixation on money in this moment is striking not only for the obvious reasons, but because she had earned a portion of it too. But that seemed to carry no weight at all. She thought of all their money as his, and even promised to try to find some work afterward to make up for the cost of her operation. She said that by not calling him

to come home, she'd save him, and that by the time she next saw him, she would be in the picturesque stage of convalescence. As optimistic as she was, she realized it was, at best, irresponsible for her to go under general anesthesia while her 10-month-old son's other parent was embedded at the front of a war and, in fact, at the time, was in the hospital himself

with yet another bout of lung trouble. I thought I must cover the possibility that you might be killed within the next few days and I might die on the table on Thursday. So at the last minute, she decided to write a will. She left everything to her sister-in-law, her brother Eric's widow, with the direction that she would provide for and take care of her son Richard. Orwell, meanwhile, got her telegram and sent back his consent for the operation. She took the hour-long bus ride to the hospital alone, checking in the

day before the operation. The next day, she wrote a letter to her husband while she waited for the morphine to take effect. Already enamored, injected, cleaned and packed up like a precious image in cotton woolen bandages. I haven't seen the doctor since I checked in, and no one knows what operation I'm having. The letter runs out as the morphine kicks in. This is a nice room. Ground floor so one can see the garden. Not much in it except daffodils and I think arabes, but a nice little lawn. My bed isn't near the window, but it faces the right way. I also see the fire and the clock. 39-year-old Eileen Blair

died on the operating table. She was too anemic to withstand the procedure. Orwell came immediately when he heard what had happened, but the anesthetist and the surgeon refused to see him. He buried his wife and then went back to Germany to continue the job he had been hired to do. He lived five years beyond the day he lost her, and in that time asked four different women to marry him, often with the irresistible line, Would you like to be the widow of a literary man?

Eventually, one of them said yes, and he married her in a hospital bed, where he was recovering from a collapse brought on by the 5,000-word-a-day pace he set for himself while typing the manuscript for his novel 1984. Too sick even to attend his own wedding reception, he died a few months later from a massive lung hemorrhage. Eileen and Orwell called their marriage an open one. He had multiple affairs, including one with Eileen's close friend, and she had a relationship with George Copp, his commander in Spain. Orwell is very fond of Copp, who indeed cherished him with real tenderness in Spain. And he is extraordinarily magnanimous about the whole business, just as Copp was extraordinarily

magnanimous. Indeed, they went about saving each other's lives or trying to in a way that was almost horrible to me. Though Orwell had not then noticed that Copp was more than a bit gone on me, I sometimes think no one ever had such a sense of guilt before. There is no record of Orwell suffering any guilt over any of his extramarital activities. In fact, when they were in Morocco, he begged Aileen for permission to visit a brothel because he found the local women so irresistibly beautiful. Apparently, she granted it. More problematically, he was known to have tried to force himself sexually onto more than one of the women in his life. The words, he pounced on me, come up a lot.

He wrote to one lifelong girlfriend, Eileen says she wished I could sleep with you about twice a year, just to keep me happy. Though, oddly enough, that relationship remained unconsummated, so happy would have been, at best, an optimistic guess. George Orwell was not what one might call free from toxic masculinity. He said he wanted to have a child in order to stop Eileen from working so hard and used a cigarette to burn their adopted son's original surname off his birth certificate. Neither has he ever been

accused of having been a feminist. One critic said, Orwell was not only anti-feminist, but he was totally blind to the role women were and are forced to play in the order of things. Another found him to be, Unfortunately, one of those male socialists who were opposed to every oppression except that of women. Yet he was drawn to a woman with a distinct personality and her own worldview. He was not simply unintimidated by her intelligence, he actually allowed it to change the way he wrote and thought.

Her impact on him can be seen as early as Keep the Espedistra Flying, which was the novel he was writing when he met her. According to biographer Sylvia Topp, Rosemary's character reflects shades of what we now know to be Eileen's personality. She is funny and an entertaining letter writer. She is patient and unsentimental with her insecure lover, and remains fiercely independent in the face of an unplanned pregnancy, an artistic choice that might surprise readers of Orwell's other works, which did not always grant female characters full agency or humanity. Most notably, the book exhibits a kind of humor that was not

exactly characteristic of Orwell's other works, And the narrator defends a psychological observation that almost seems to have been written in response to, perhaps, a budding psychologist's note. The thought that he was merely objectifying his own inner misery hardly troubled him. Both Rosemary and Eileen rejected the concept of a wife's obedience to her husband in marriage. and Eileen rejected the concept of a wife's obedience to her husband in marriage. Eileen secretly omitted it from her vows in advance of their wedding. Writing to Nora about homage to Catalonia, Eileen said, I give him typescripts, the reverse sides of which are covered with manuscript emendations that he can't read, and he is always having to speak about it. And Orwell said the book had its title.

Because we couldn't think of a better one. Clearly, she functioned in an editorial capacity as well as a secretarial one. She called his novel coming up for air as it was in process. A book that pleases both of us very much. Orwell even told a friend, It was a terrible shame that Eileen didn't live to see the publication of Animal Farm, which she was particularly fond of and even helped in the planning of. Orwell biographers have often commented on Eileen's influence without knowing how to name it,

partly for lack of evidence, but also, it seems, a refusal to consider her in that way. One noted a striking change of mood in 1936 without connecting it to Orwell's marriage, which took place that year, or the person with whom that marriage connected him. There are indications in Coming up for air and elsewhere that he was capable of a more contemplative and psychological approach. But I can't understand it or explain exactly what happened. I just don't know. But I quite agree there was an enormous change. And yet that same observer said of homage to Catalonia. This is the first occasion in any of Orwell's books on which one feels that he really looked at, saw, and paid attention to another human being.

Perhaps because Eileen was along for the journey too. Other critics are clearer about Eileen's influence. Desmond Avery noticed, How much deeper Orwell's critical intelligence and wider his knowledge became after their marriage? Avery felt sure that Eileen must have helped Orwell with some of his many pieces for the BBC, and Orwell was known to tell people that Eileen could have been a writer herself. So why wasn't she?

Top notes that when she was at Oxford, Eileen had read Wordsworth's devoted sister Dorothy's letters and journals, which talked of her happiness at holing up with her brother to devote their lives to his art. Eileen followed, in a sense, in those footsteps, devoting herself to a man she loved and sublimating herself entirely to both his ambition and his vision of what life should be, all because she found him interesting. He, on the verge of becoming George Orwell, listed Arthur on the occupation line of their wedding certificate. She drew a line through that space and became Eileen Blair. But until the letters to Nora came to light, Eileen was sort of just a person in the background of Orwell's story. A cool but loving voice beside him, as one biographer put it. So those text exchanges you have going with your best friend might be more valuable than you think.

Orwell's publisher said of Animal Farm, The writer of rather great novels had suddenly taken wings and become a poet. That was what Eileen had been once upon a time. She even wrote one, which she published the year before she met Orwell, entitled, End of the Century, 1984. Synthetic winds have blown away,

material dust, but this one room rebukes the constant violet ray and dustless sheds a dusty room. It's now thought Orwell was consciously honoring his deceased wife by borrowing from her poem for his final novel. Orwell's 1984 begins on April 4th, the day after Eileen's funeral, and it opens with a clock, which is the last word she wrote before she died. The character of Julia can certainly be seen as a version of Eileen, not only in appearance, but as a woman who might also be called rowdy. Eileen Blair did not gift her husband with his oracular vision, his literary voice, or his tenacious drive, but her influence on his work

is evident all over the place. Not only did she type his manuscripts, a job which, when he took it on himself, essentially led to his demise, she edited and inspired them. And, in her own letters, she enriches our view of one of modern Western civilization's best writers with passages like this one, which comes from a letter Eileen wrote to Nora in the dark, since her husband had all the candles in his room and she was wary of disturbing him. Eric, I mean George, has just come in to say that the light is out. And is there any oil? Such a question. And I can't type in the light, which may be true, but I can't read it. And he is hungry and wants some cocoa and some biscuits.

And it is after midnight and Marx is eating a bone and has left pieces in each chair. And which shall he sit on now? Special thanks to Sally Drexler and Nigel Daly for bringing Eileen Blair and George Orwell to life. I'd also like to thank Ben Partridge, Luke Millington-Drake, Tom Wicks, Amelia Chapelot, and Colin Anderson for lending their voices to the story. And I'd like to thank my significant other

for driving me to my last colonoscopy. Join us tomorrow for a follow-up conversation with author Sandra Newman to discuss her reimagining 1984 from the point of view of its main female character. Significant Others is written and read by me, Liza Powell O'Brien. I'm not a historian, and I'm greatly indebted to the work of those who are. In some cases, I use diaries or newspapers or court records as sources, but most often I draw from biographies and autobiographies and articles, which represent countless hours of work by people who are far more knowledgeable than I. Sources for each episode are listed in the show notes.

If you hear something interesting and you want to know more, please consider ordering these books from your independent bookseller. And if you are a historian or someone who knows something about the people I'm talking about, and you'd like to take issue with an impression I've made or a conclusion I've drawn, I welcome the dialogue. Thank you. Significant Others is produced by GenSamples. Our executive producers are Nick Liao, Adam Sachs, Jeff Ross, and Colin Anderson. Engineering and sound design by Eduardo Perez, Rich Garcia, and Joanna Samuel. Music and scoring by Eduardo Perez and Hannes Brown. Research and fact-checking by Michael Waters and Hannah Sio. Special thanks to Lisa Berm, Jason Chalemi, and Joanna Solitaroff.

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