Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, T.
S.
She was his Hyacinth Girl..
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
That correspondence--some 1,131 letters--released by Princeton University\'s Firestone Library only in 2020--shows us in exquisite detail the Hidden Eliot.
She was his Hidden muse.
She was the source of memory and desire in The Waste Land .
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.
But there was another side to Eliot, as acclaimed biographer Lyndall Gordon reveals in her new biography, The Hyacinth Girl .
Like the authoritative yet restrained voice in his prose, he was the epitome of reserve.
Louis, shaped by his youth in Boston, he reinvented himself as an Englishman after converting to the Anglican Church.
Raised in St.
His poems The Waste Land and Four Quartets are classics of the modernist canon, while his essays influenced a school of literary criticism.
Eliot was considered the greatest English-language poet of his generation.
Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, T.
S
