Happy Valentine's Day to the Gaslit Nation family.

While the rest of the world is busy with hard-shaped boxes and denial, we know that some

of the most consequential stories are the ones that are a bit more complicated.

If you are in the mood for a romance, specifically a toxic one that actually

changed the world, you need to meet Eileen Oshok Nessi. She was the brilliant, overlooked force

behind George Orwell. And together, they created enduring works of art that gave us a language to

confront the darkness today. Her descendants practically credit her with writing Animal Farm.

She was, Eileen was more Orwell than Orwell. She would give these fiery speeches as a schoolgirl

saying that the pen is mightier than the sword,

and we must not look away.

So when George Orwell was a young man hiding in the British Imperial Police in Burma and being part of the fascist machinery,

Eileen was breaking barriers being among one of the first women to graduate from

Oxford, where she studied literature under the great J.R.R. Tolkien, who he himself turned his

trauma, being a soldier in the Great War and losing friends in the Great War, and he took that

trauma and turned it into extraordinary art.

Of course, Lord of the Rings and all of that world and fantasy that help us make sense of

the times we're in today.

And so Eileen started under Tolkien.

She then embraced a radical new field called Child Psychology, an Orwell's big breakout book that made him

finally rich and famous was Animal Farm, a children's book. So Eileen is a major unsung historian,

heroine of literature. There would have been no George Orwell without her. That's 100% true,

because she literally saved his life on the front lines of

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