Overview

"Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, T. S. Eliot was considered the greatest English-language poet of his generation. 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. 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 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; recreates his relationship with Mary Trevelyan, a wartime woman of action; and finally, explores his marriage to the young Valerie Fletcher. 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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Reviews

"""If this fine and entertaining account leaves readers shocked by instances of Eliot's theatrical and self-serving misogyny (he 'felt burdened by women'), it also treats the women in his life with dignity and goes a long way in reversing the erasure he attempted...Literature lovers, take note."" -- ""Publishers Weekly (starred review)"" ""In 2019, a cache of more than 1,000 letters from T. S. Eliot to his friend Emily Hale was finally unsealed, and Gordon was among the first to study them."" -- ""New York Times Book Review"""

Author Information

Lyndall Gordon is the author of Vindication: A Life of Mary Wollstonecraft, a New York Times Notable Book; Virginia Woolf: A Writer's Life, winner of the James Tait Black Prize for Biography; and biographies of T. S. Eliot and Charlotte Bronte. She is a senior research fellow at St. Hilda's College in Oxford, England. Buffy Davis is an actress, known for Anna Karenina, The Machinist, and Angel Has Fallen.

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