Portrait of Eileen: the forgotten talent behind George Orwell

GironaWhen George Orwell (1903-1950) decides to travel to Catalonia in 1936 to fight as a militiaman in the Civil War and "kill fascists", he does not go alone. He had only been married for a few months to Eileen O'Shaughnessy, a brilliant 30-year-old woman who surpassed him in many educational aspects. While Eric Blair, the real name of the young English writer, had no more than secondary education at Eton, she had accumulated the background of having studied literature at Oxford and a postgraduate degree in psychology in London. They will have an unusual "honeymoon": while Orwell is on the Aragon front, Eileen will work in Barcelona receiving British militiamen and will be the first to realize the seriousness of the internal conflict that will lead to the May Events.

This trip will be the beginning of a ten-year marriage that will forever mark Orwell's writing style. For decades, scholars of the writer had tiptoed around it, but the discovery of some letters from Eileen to a university friend in 2005 revealed a way of seeing the world and, above all, a typically Irish humor and the "luminosity" that would emerge in Orwell's first major publishing success: Animal Farm (1945). To what extent was Eileen, responsible for correspondence, editorial management, typing, and proofs, an influence on Orwell's work? Would the fable about Stalinism have been the same?

In Eileen. Portrait of a Marriage (Edicions 62), the latest recipient of the Narrativa Joanot Martorell prize, Miquel Berga (Salt, 1952) gives voice to a key and forgotten figure in the Orwellian universe. In a great exercise of non-fiction novel, in which every detail is documented and proven, the specialist in English literature alternates chapters in which he unravels the life and work of the author of Homage to Catalonia" and 1984" with letters written by his wife to a friend with an absolutely plausible voice. A play of mirrors that had already begun in When History Burns Your Hand (Tusquets, 2020) by analyzing the tensions between Orwell and the English poet W.H. Auden (1907-1973) during the Civil War.

A feminist 'avant la lettre'

"I'm such a fan of Eileen that I've dedicated a book to her that makes you fall in love with her –explains Berga–. To me, she is a feminist avant la lettre who freely decides, for ideals, to go to the Civil War. She and Orwell are not a conventional marriage: they are two young revolutionaries and idealists who are starting an adventure without literally having anything". To begin with, Eileen will give up a comfortable life for a dilapidated house in the country with no water or electricity where the "daily battle" will be to share candles and ink. Already during the marriage, she will ask the priest to remove "obedience" to her husband from the vows, and in Barcelona, she will hide Orwell's manuscript under the bed so that the police do not confiscate it.

For years, she will be the only one to support the family, with a husband with severe episodes of tuberculosis who, paradoxically, will not achieve fame until a few months after Eileen's death in 1945, and will immediately seek a second wife to manage the copyrights and the recently adopted son. "The book is the chronicle of the before, when they still don't know what they will become, and they are two stoics who become specialists in facing adverse situations", reflects Berga. It is also the reaction she had to the essay written by academic Anna Fonder, Wifedom. Mrs Orwell invisible life (2024), in which she first reproached Orwell for not mentioning his wife in his work and second, the biographers for having reduced Eileen to a footnote. "I was afraid of cancelling Orwell, but patriarchy had already cancelled her", pointed out Fonder.

The message of '1984'

To Eileen. Portrait of a Marriage, Berga avoids constructing the image of a victim. In an exciting novelized epilogue, Orwell speaks to give new meaning to the title of 1984. "For many years I explained in class the theory that it was a game with 1948, when the work I had written spitting blood, literally – says Berga–. But after delving into Eileen's story, I see a new meaning." And it is that in 1934, a year before the young Eric and Eileen met at a party in a student apartment in London, O'Shaughnessy had written a poem in which he already spoke of a society with mental control and the eradication of personal freedom by the police state. He did so within the framework of the celebration of the 50th anniversary of his high school, where he projected what the world would be like in its centenary, in 1984.

Berga's book, with different literary voices, is also an opportunity to get to know Orwell's life very closely, with all the luxury of detail and in a very informative way, and the key events that would mark a work more relevant than ever in a new world with clashing superpowers. "Orwell has been a writer of posthumous victories – says Berga–. It is as if reality and current events were heading to confirm the worst terrors that Orwell wanted to avoid with a satire like 1984".