Sally Jerome, who has died aged 97, was the principal model for Rosemary, Gordon Comstock's girlfriend in George Orwell's 1936 novel Keep The Aspidistra Flying. A South African-born scion of the Opppenheimer dynasty, she was also a long-time Communist Party member, a Fleet Street graphic artist, a weaver and an extraordinarily English eccentric.
Born Sadie Hertzberg in Johannesburg, her mother brought her to England when she was six months old and reverted to using her maiden name, Jerome, after her husband gambled the family's fortune away. Discreetly supported by her aunt, the music hall star Daisy Jerome, she was sent to Penlee Private School in Kent. Happy holidays were spent with other theatrical offspring, including those of the Edwardian actor Beerbohm Tree's family.
At 15, she was sent to Berlin to train as a fashion artist. After six months, she switched to the Berlin State School of the Arts where she studied design for five years. Returning to South Africa, she was reunited with her father, who then lost the wealth he had recouped in the meantime in the 1929 crash. He committed suicide - which also ruptured the relationship with the Oppenheimers.
Returning to London in 1930 she worked on lay-out for the Sunday Chronicle and the Daily Sketch, and met Orwell in 1933. She found him too self-obsessed, and the relationship foundered.
She joined the Communist party in 1936, deeply shocking her mother, who found her selling the Daily Worker outside Paddington Station. She further shocked her mother in 1940, and fellow party members, by moving to Liverpool with a married man. There she found work in engineering.
After that relationship failed she became, in her words, a "notoriously clumsy" munitions worker - carrying trays of detonators - who was soon moved to a less perilous position. Sally found a more congenial niche as a welfare supervisor, which led her to Huddersfield.
In 1945 she switched to the textile industry and discovered an extraordinary aptitude as a weaver. She never regretted her move. Her political involvement persisted; she ran for the local council as a Communist, in the late 1940s, served on the Huddersfield Trades Council and was a vigorous member of the Campaign For Nuclear Disarmament.
Despite eye problems, she became Huddersfield College of Arts's oldest student after retiring in 1965. Abrupt changes of technique and style mirrored her life's pattern as she produced memorable scenes of Yorkshire and London. She wasn't painting for money, she insisted, but was happy to sell her works.
A cheap travelling camping holiday in an old van took Sally to Berlin in the 1960s. During a brief visit to East Berlin she found relatives still living where she had lodged in the 1920s as a student. A resultant discreet approach by an Oppenheimer family representative led to them buying her the Huddersfield house she lived in, a pension and several paid painting holidays.
Forthright and blunt, she could be annoyingly persistent and disarmingly frank about her shortcomings. There were ironies. Raised as a rich, white, South African by black servants, in the last couple of years she came under the care of a welfare service largely staffed by people from Jamaican backgrounds.
Maybe it evoked happy childhood memories. The demanding behaviour that had tried and tested her friends' patience ended. She had found repose, and praise for the women who cared for her during that last year.
· Sally Jerome, weaver and painter, born June 19 1905; died July 8 2002.