"Now that is the kind of girl I would like to marry!" George Orwell told a friend, the night he met Eileen O’Shaughnessy in March 1935, at a party he had uncharacteristically suggested hosting at his flat on Parliament Hill. Orwell was 31 at the time, the author of three not particularly successful books, still using his birth name, Eric Blair. Eileen was 29, an Oxford graduate, vivacious and exceedingly pretty, with what Orwell described as “a cat’s face”.

She had a mischievous sense of humour. Her friend Lydia Jackson recalled that, when she told you something amusing, her “eyes could dance… like a kitten’s watching a dangling object” even as “you knew that she habitually embroidered her stories”. She had “Irish colouring: dark hair, light blue eyes and [a] delicate white and pink complexion”, and was “rather gawky in the way she moved”.

Recounting the evening to a friend, Eileen said she had been “rather drunk, behaving my worst, very rowdy.” Within a few weeks, Orwell had proposed. Eileen joked to Lydia: “I told myself that when I was 30 I would accept the first man who asked me to marry him. Well… I shall be 30 [this] year.”

She gave up her postgraduate degree in psychology at the University of London and went on to share nine more years of a sometimes joyful, sometimes gruelling life with Orwell: at first subsisting happily with him in a Hertfordshire village where they grew vegetables and tended their own goats and chickens; then following him into the dangers of the Spanish Civil War; nursing him in Morocco after a severe bout of tubercular bleeding; surviving the Blitz with him; and all the while typing – and improving – his manuscripts. She believed completely in his genius as a writer, and their partnership through those years produced some of Orwell’s greatest works.

“Eileen was a dreamer. To marry Orwell and share his curious life-style [...] she had to have a streak of mystical dream,” concluded one of her UCL friends. Since her teenage years, she’d admired missionaries and saints, espoused self-denial and rejection of worldly greed. Orwell constantly pushed himself beyond what his body could stand – one old girlfriend remembered that he was always trying to be a “he-man” – and Eileen, too, tried to ignore her own sickly constitution, “a woman careless of creature comforts”, as her friends recalled. (David Astor, a friend of the couple, thought it was “occasionally uncanny… how much they seemed alike and how much they spoke alike”.)