9 June 1936 - 29 March 1945 (her death) (1 adopted son)
son, Richard Horatio.
Eileen met Eric in the spring of 1935. At the time Eric was living at 77 Parliament Hill in Hampstead, occupying a spare room in the first floor flat of Rosalind Henschel Obermeyer, a niece of the conductor and composer Sir George Henschel and a friend of Mabel Fierze.
Rosalind Obermeyer was taking an advanced course in psychology at University College, London; one evening she invited some of her friends and acquaintances to a party. One "was an attractive young woman whom Rosalind did not know especially well, although they often sat next to each other at lectures: her name was Eileen O'Shaughnessy." Elizaveta Fen recalled Orwell in her memoirs, Orwell and his friend Richard Rees, "draped" at the fireplace, looking, she thought, "moth-eaten and prematurely aged."
Eric Blair married Eileen O'Shaugnessy the next year, on 9 June 1936, at St Mary's Church, Wallington, Hertfordshire (as Eric Arthur Blair and Eileen Maud O'Shaugnessy; at this time he was known as Orwell only in his writing, his friends knew him as Eric or Blair; and he "never quite got around to changing it"). Blair, though a non-practising member of the Church of England, "was sufficiently a traditionalist to wish to be married in it." They tried to have children, but Eileen did not become pregnant and they learnt (though not for another two years) that Orwell was sterile, as he told Rayner Heppenstall, as Eileen confided in Elizaveta Fen.
At the start of World War II, Eileen started work in the Censorship Department of the Ministry of War in London, staying during the week with her family in Greenwich. Her brother Laurence was killed by a bomb during the evacuation from Dunkirk, after which, according to Elizaveta Fen, "her grip on life, which had never been very firm, loosened considerably."
In spring 1942, she changed jobs to work at the Ministry of Food. In June 1944 she and Eric adopted a three-week old boy they named Richard Horatio. In one of her last letters to Blair, Eileen wrote of arrangements for renting and decorating Barnhill, Jura, the house where Orwell would write most of Nineteen Eighty Four – but she died before she ever saw Barnhill.