Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, T.S. Eliot was considered
the greatest English-language poet of his generation. His poems The
Waste Land and Four Quartets are classics of the modernist canon,
while his essays influenced a school of literary criticism. Raised
in St. Louis, shaped by his youth in Boston, he reinvented himself
as an Englishman after converting to the Anglican Church. Like the
authoritative yet restrained voice in his prose, he was the epitome
of reserve. But there was another side to Eliot, as acclaimed
biographer Lyndall Gordon reveals in her new biography, The
Hyacinth Girl. While married twice, Eliot had an almost lifelong
love for Emily Hale, an American drama teacher to whom he wrote
extensive, illuminating, deeply personal letters. She was the
source of "memory and desire" in The Waste Land. She was his hidden
muse. That correspondence-some 1,131 letters-released by Princeton
University's Firestone Library only in 2020-shows us in exquisite
detail the hidden Eliot. Gordon plumbs the archive to recast Hale's
role as the first and foremost woman of the poet's life, tracing
the ways in which their ardor and his idealization of her figured
in his art. For Eliot's relationships, as Gordon explains, were
inextricable from his poetry, and Emily Hale was not the sole woman
who entered his work. Gordon sheds new light on Eliot's first
marriage to the flamboyant Vivienne; re-creates his relationship
with Mary Trevelyan, a wartime woman of action; and finally,
explores his marriage to the young Valerie Fletcher, whose devotion
to Eliot and whose physical ease transformed him into a man "made
for love." This stunning portrait of Eliot will compel not only a
reassessment of the man-judgmental, duplicitous, intensely
conflicted, and indubitably brilliant-but of the role of the choice
women in his life and his writings. And at the center was Emily
Hale in a love drama that Eliot conceived and the inspiration for
the poetry he wrote that would last beyond their time. She was his
"Hyacinth Girl."
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