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 10 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 biographies 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, Ilene.

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 D.J. 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.

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