Sarah Aitchison, Head of UCL Special Collections, and Richard Blair
Sarah Aitchison, Head of UCL Special Collections, and Richard Blair - Fifty letters written by George Orwell to two women he sought to marry and who became lifelong friends have been donated by the author's son, Richard Blair, to the Orwell Archive at UCL. The letters reveal new details about Orwell's life in the 1930s - including his overlapping romances, his love of ice skating, and his struggle to write and publish his first novels. They also show that the two women, Brenda Salkeld and Eleanor Jaques, whom he met while staying with his parents in Southwold, Suffolk, had a profound importance in his life lasting long after his romances with them appeared to have ended. (They both turned down his marriage proposals - Eleanor married his friend, Dennis Collings, while Brenda stayed single. In a letter to Brenda in 1940, four years into his marriage with his first wife, Eileen O'Shaughnessy, and as a German invasion appeared imminent, he wrote: "It's a pity.. we never made love properly. We could have been so happy.
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