Painted Shadow: The Life of Vivienne Eliot, First Wife of T. S. Eliot

by Carole Seymour-Jones

This astonishing portrait of Vivienne Eliot, first wife of poet T.S. Eliot, gives a voice to the woman who, for seventeen years, had shared a unique literary partnership with Eliot but who was scapegoated for the failure of the marriage and all but obliterated from historical record. In so doing, Painted Shadow opens the way to a new understanding of Eliot’s poetry.

Vivienne longed to tell her whole story; she wrote in her diary: “You who in later years will read these very words of mine will be able to trace a true history of this epoch.” She believed (as did Virginia Woolf) that she was Eliot’s muse, the woman through whom he transmuted life into art. Yet Vivienne knew the secrets of his separate and secret life — which contributed to her own deepening hysteria, drug addiction, and final abandonment: the tragedy of a marriage that paired a repressed yet sensual man with an extroverted woman who longed for a full sexual relationship with her husband.

Out of this emotional turbulence came one of the most important English poems of the twentieth century: The Waste Land, which Carole Seymour-Jones convincingly shows cannot be fully understood without reference to the relationship of the poet and his first wife. Drawing on papers both privately owned and in university library archives and, most importantly, on Vivienne Eliot’s own journals left to the Bodleian Library, Oxford, Carole Seymour-Jones uses many hitherto unpublished sources and opens the way to a new understanding of Eliot’s poetry.

Genres: Biography, Nonfiction, History, Poetry, Feminism, Psychology, Literature

736 pages, Paperback

First published October 25, 2001

About the author

Carole Seymour-Jones was born in North Wales.
Educated at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, and Sussex University, she became the acclaimed biographer of Beatrice Webb, Simone de Beauvoir and Vivienne Eliot, while her most recent book examined the life of Anglo-French SOE agent Pearl Witherington. She cited fellow biographers Richard Holmes and Hermione Lee, plus historian Antony Beevor, among her influences . A teacher of creative non-fiction, memoir and biography, Carole was a Visiting Fellow at the University of Surrey, a regular broadcaster, and judge of the Biographers’ Club Tony Lothian Prize.
Her biography 'Painted Shadow: The Life of Vivienne Eliot' was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize. She was the chair of the Writers in Prison Committee of English PEN, and co-editor of 'Another Sky: Voices of Conscience from Around the World', a collection of pieces by writers imprisoned for expressing their views.

Reviews

[Roman Clodia · Rating 4 out of 5]

'It was only when I saw Vivie in the asylum for the last time I realized I had done something very wrong. She was as sane as I was... What Tom and I did was wrong.'
(Maurice Haigh-Wood, Vivien's brother)

This is a sympathetic biography of Vivien Haigh-Wood, the wife of poet T.S. Eliot. It's well-researched making extensive use of Viv's diaries, papers, published writings and sketches as well as contemporary commentary especially from Virginia Woolf, Ottoline Morrell and other friends and relations - there are about 200 pages of notes and references at the end. It also gives a warm and vivid portrait of Viv herself from Jazz Age/flapper/New Woman to that sad and poignant shadow committed to an asylum by her husband and brother.

Yet, for all that, I can't help feeling that Seymour-Jones had almost made up her mind about Viv ahead of the evidence. I haven't read another biography so that's no more than gut feel but there's an underlying sense that the author slightly wants to downplay the unpalatable: we're quite late in the book, for example, before we learn that Viv shared Eliot's right-wing views (he was notoriously anti-Semitic and was forced to cut offensive language and imagery from his poetry, including from The Waste Land): she joyously joined the women's wing of the British Union of Fascists; hung a portrait of Oswald Mosley in her drawing room (albeit maybe to create a link with her absent husband) and enjoyed walking around London wearing a fascist uniform. Most of this appears late because it's part of her life in the 1930s but it's also the first time we've heard about Viv having any political views at all.

It's also worth saying that this falls into that common trap of biographies of women associated with famous men where the man gets at least as much as, if not more, attention as the supposed female subject. I know it's hard when, like here, the marriage is such an important part of Viv's life but there is a huge amount of material on what Eliot was doing outside of his marriage: his discussions with Pound on poetry and writing, his relationships with other women like Mary Hutchinson and Emily Hale who was in the US, and his career at first Lloyds Bank and then Faber. That said, it's fascinating to see the extent to which Eliot expected other people to support him financially: he lived off money from his parents for years and allowed Ottoline to set up an early sort of crowd funding initiative to support him. All the same, however interesting, this does lead to a feeling at times of Viv being sidelined and marginalised in her own biography.

Despite some issues, though, this does offer what appears to be a rounded life of Viv. There's a good focus on her own writing and the contributions she made to Eliot's work. Extracts from Viv's letters, diaries and her sketches give us her own voice: sharp, funny, scathing, passionate, desperate, wretched at times. Given that she is a figure largely mediated via other people's views, not least Tom and Viv, as well as Woolf's commentary on her and Eliot in her diaries and letters, this is an important addition.

As for the notorious 'madness': the author places this in the medical and psychiatric context of the time and makes clear the extent to which Eliot himself suffered, arguably, with equal mental health issues. He suffers at least one breakdown and lived in fear of another during which Viv took care of him. Despite that, there are a number of occasions where Eliot sends Viv away to a 'sanatorium' and leaves her there. The final scenes where Eliot and Viv's brother collude to get her committed are painful to read, as is Maurice's admission in an interview towards the end of his life that his sister was as sane as he was in the asylum and that he and Eliot were guilty of great wrong. It's impossible not to place Viv into a long line of women deemed 'mad' for not conforming to patriarchal ideals or for being 'difficult' - or both - though the author goes a step too far, perhaps, in suggesting that it was Eliot and this dysfunctional marriage which were the direct causes of Viv's 'insanity'.

Nevertheless, it's hard not to agree that it was certainly convenient for her husband to have her incarcerated: he had access to her inheritance as well as being able to mute her accusations of bad treatment and potential revelations about his closet (probable) homosexuality. Eliot's own neuroses (he refused to ever even shave in front of his wife) and up-tightness, his disgust with Viv's feminine body and the intimation of sexual problems, possibly impotence with Viv, leading to him refusing to share a bed with her, even sleeping in a deck-chair in one of their small flats were certainly hard to live with, as was his increasingly strident religiosity where Viv became, in the Eliot mythology, the lurid whore-like face of sin (as opposed to Emily Hale's cool virgin other). And yet Viv, to the end of her life, never broke rank or loyalty to her husband.

There are places where Seymour-Jones steps forward too far for me telling me what to think: where this book works best is where she traces the sources and keeps her presentation cool and impersonal. I'd still like to read another view of Viv as well as reviewing her writing and diaries for myself - but this is an excellent first biography of a fascinating yet vulnerable woman who should never have been locked away as 'mad'.

[Luke · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't know what people expect to find when they come across this work and decide to be interested in it. It's not triumphant. It's not original. You'll start in a suppressed and uncomfortable place and end in one differently suppressed and more finally uncomfortable with all the White Women Problems as exemplified by Rhys and Plath and the ignorance of Jane Eyre. Sure, the gory details of a bildungsroman that happened to burgeon into the Bloomsbury group with its fascists and its anti-Semitics and its emotionally weak women haters rather intrigue, and the fact that the Nobel Laureate was so insistent on burying his first wife means readers will get more than their fill of the husband in an effort to circumscribe the ghost, but still. It's nothing much but a whole lot of institutionalization via drugs and biology and copyright on a sinking ship of rats, and whoever cannibalizes best cannibalizes last.

The only thing that's changed between the days of Vivienne Haigh's later Haigh-Wood's later Eliot's neurosis at the hands of a menstruation-shaming society and today's pro-lifers are the names of the weak willed slags who would shit themselves if they ever had to consider giving birth or waking up in a pool of their own blood and membranes. While I'll admit that my hopes for this biography waned as detail mounted on detail and subsequent conclusions became insufferably Freudian and mental illness mystical (if I had a dime for every time someone clustered around the cult of "oh I'm crazy but not like those crazies I'm a cool crazy y'know" I'd be set enough in life to tell them off in public), the consideration from the get-go of how society stigmatizes and subsequently traumatizes the female aspects of biological reproduction gets full marks. If there's one thing public readers have a problem with, it's the consideration that something that affects half the population interacts with every level of economics, social standing, and capabilities both physical and mental; in Vivienne's time, woe to you if people don't believe your pain is quite that bad, your bleeding that life endangering, your vertigo that signifying of a condition that ten years later will upgrade from manageable to life-managing. Don't believe me? Hilary Mantel of Wolf Hall fame can tell you all about it, misdiagnosis of psychosis and subsequent misapplication of drugs generating psychosis until self-diagnosis extracted the self out of a hell hole of who-knows-what-the-doctors-thought-they-knew and all. And this is the 70's we're talking. One wonders if the whole shitfest over drugs has less to do with self-administered overdose and more to do with the populace being less comfortable with doctors tranquilizing them for their own "good." Vivienne's certainly a very reassuring case on that latter front.

Outside of that? It's a self-serving soul-sucking free emotional labor via the female/black/Jewish/etc etc mess. One white boy gets it into his head to escape whatever this pain is he's so lifelong impacted by, (rumor has it that he's gay, but the estate's rather trigger happy so let's just comment on the grand amount of diary entries and historical interactions) and so he's just gotta shit on everyone in his effort to find True Happiness. So long as you got the family fortune and the cross-Atlantic citizenship and the unpaid secretarial labor and and pimping potential as co-habitating spouse, grand. However, should you interpret the shadow as a chance for protected growth and the relationship as reciprocating rather than a pick and choose and discard once the base is stable and the so-longed for professional status as both Groundbreaking and Classic, think again. The Roaring Twenties will turn to Noir, the dancing and the literary pursuits will turn to bumping off the mistress for the wife family fortune and the husband family jewels, and the diminishing of everything that cannot be weighed and checked and propagated in the face of Law and Religion will strike you down. Sure, some can make it, but every new restriction exponentiates the chances of hanging from the rafters and dying in the street. Sure, we're all human, but the statistics of who uses and whom is used are remarkably stable.

One of the experimental female authors I'm reading this quarter was raped and murdered by who the fuck knows. This is but one of the possibilities I consider every time I go over those in the canon who survived long enough to enter it by means of not being cannibalized (or leastwise not enough) by who the fuck knows. Am I obligated to pass over it as a given in my analysis that, for the foreseeable future, the academic world is just not quite ready to factor into scholarship? From one atheist to all you cannibals out there: I'll see you in hell.

[Mat · Rating 4 out of 5]

Boy, oh boy, oh boy. Where to begin with this one? I feel like I've just been put through the ringer.

Reading this book was quite a visceral experience. This is as much a biography of T. S. Eliot as it is of his first wife, Vivienne (Eliot) Haigh-wood. This is a tragic story about two people who were extremely ill-suited for each other in marriage but at the same time, there was some inexplicable literary chemistry between them without which The Waste Land would never have been written. Yes, I wish to repeat this simple fact once again - without Vivien, there would have been no Waste Land.

In the Spring term this year I decided to teach a course on T. S. Eliot for the first time covering his early work such as Prufrock, through to The Waste Land, The Hollow Men and finally Four Quartets, his final masterpiece, but I really wished I had read this book beforehand. Instead, I relied on various books which analyse the numerous subtle literary allusions and references that are scattered throughout Eliot's work, which is also important I must argue, but without reading this book, I now realise that I was only gazing at the 'trees', and missing the 'forest' which was staring at me in the face the whole time.

This is because after you read Painted Shadow you realise that much of Eliot's work is essentially this: subtly-coded autobiography. First of all, the title of this biography refers to the character of a wife in Eliot's play The Family Reunion: a "restless painted shivering shadow" which undoubtedly was based on Vivien herself. There is a famous picture, in fact one of the last pictures of Vivien together with Eliot, taken at Virginia Woolf's house, and Vivien looks like a wraith, standing aloof and away from Woolf and her husband, like she is about to fade out of the picture into the sepia background. It may also be a reference to the shades and shadows in Dante that have passed into the next world and we must remember here that Eliot not only loved Dante and was greatly influenced by him but actually believed in hell. Eliot was possibly haunted by the possibility that he was going to hell and judging from this book, I would not blame the Devil if he came to claim his soul.

Before reading this book, when I heard that Seymour-Jones was claiming that Eliot was a homosexual, I didn't rule it out or dismiss it but dove into her work with an open mind thinking that there are other possibilities - sexual dysfunction or perhaps he might have been asexual - something which we now know more about but Seymour-Jones may not have when she wrote this. Well, it turns out that she was most definitely right. She convinced me. After reading this book, I have no doubt that Eliot was gay, and of course there is nothing at all wrong with that. But why did he get married? Or better yet, let's use Vivien's own words that reach out to us from The Waste Land itself, "What you get married for if you don't want to have children?" Although Eliot cleverly puts these words through the voice of one of the characters in The Waste Land, whenever I (re)read that poem, I will always see Vivien's imploring face as she questions her strange husband. Once again, I would like to emphasise the point about subtly-coded autobiography. The reason he got married is a very simple one - respectability and also possibly he deceived himself into thinking that he could 'cure' his homosexuality by getting married. It's funny how someone as intelligent as Eliot, could also be that stupid. At that time, in the early 20th Century, there is no way Eliot could have risen through the ranks of the literature hierarchy without being a married man, or at least being a confirmed heterosexual - it is hard for us in the 21st Century to imagine how strong the prejudices really were back then. We are talking about a time when homosexuality had a long way to go before being accepted, and also a time which was rife with anti-Semitism, and one thing that surprised me about this book was the discovery that Vivien was as anti-Semitic as her husband but not to the point where she went and lived under Mussolini's Italy, like Ezra Pound.

Seymour-Jones should be applauded for this fantastic biography that resurrects the legacy of Vivien Eliot, a talented writer herself, as many of her writings in the literary journal The Criterion (edited by TSE) testify. She wrote under various nom-de-plumes such as Fanny Marlow (an explicit and quite brazen possible reference to her affair with Bertrand Russell at their cottage in Marlow where he would enjoy her "fanny" - this is how Seymour-Jones herself analyses it - "fanny" in the British/Australian sense of "vagina" that is, not the American "fanny" which refers to one's "backside/bum/arse.") and the reason she used pseudonyms is because she scathingly attacked members of the famous Bloomsbury Group. Now, this is where it gets interesting - this was the beginning of the end for Vivien, who slowly began to call herself Daisy Miller, portraying herself as the tragic character from Fitzgerald's legendary novel. Although Eliot loved and admired what his wife sarcastically and maliciously wrote about other people in their circle they both knew, in a sick private joke between her and him, Eliot was forced to take Vivien off The Criterion 'team' because someone figured out who 'Fanny Marlow' was and there were consequences. But Wyndham Lewis wrote an equally scathing book on The Bloomsbury Group called The Apes of God, but got away with it - partly because he wasn't an integral member of the group, partly because he had other sources of income including his other novels and paintings, and partly because simply he was a man.

After Eliot goes to Harvard to give his famous lectures, Vivien's real breakdown begins - and this is where it gets impossibly sad. This is where I got really angry. You realise at this stage that not only has Eliot denied Vivien's chances of any happiness by being a husband who could never satisfy her emotionally or physically, but on top of this he abandons her in the most cowardly fashion by slipping off to America and then back into England without her even knowing it and hiding from her. What a cowardly rat. I have a great interest and respect in Eliot's work as a poet but after reading this book, I have zero respect for him as a human being. I would rather have little to no talent at poetry/writing and be a decent human being than the other way around, which Eliot clearly was, if Seymour-Jones' research is accurate, which I assume it is.

We also discover (if we didn't suspect already) just how much Eliot was really in love with Jean Verdenal, the Frenchman to whom much of his poetry is dedicated and who died in WWI in Gallipoli. They probably had an affair when Eliot was in Paris as much imagery in Eliot's poetry evokes memories of Jean. For example the opening line of The Waste Land, "April is the cruelest month" - I used to think this was a reference to Chaucer (and partly it may be so) but now I realise that April would always recall, to Eliot, the month when his beloved Jean died in the war. Eliot must have found it amusing how much scholars and critics painstakingly and lovingly analysed his work, diving into various references in Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Laforgue etc. but all along many of the answers were to be found in his actual life - once again we missed the 'forest' while gazing at the 'trees'. This is one of the real strengths of this book. Seymour-Jones' chapter on The Waste Land is excellent and in fact should be compulsory reading for any Eliot scholar. That poem, THE modernist poem par excellence, makes much more sense after you have read this section.

Seymour-Jones conducted extensive research into Vivien's journals and notebooks at the Bodleian Library - I'm so glad that they have survived, otherwise Vivien's story would have been lost to history. This book gives her, finally, the long-overdue credit that she deserves and makes us reassess Eliot's work and life.

It must be said that Vivien herself was no saint - she had an affair with Bertrand Russell (probably after realising that her husband was gay and that there would be little to no physical relationship at all between them (their failed honeymoon is a classic example) - for which she should at least be partly exonerated then) and Russell was a very busy playboy having affairs with women left, right and centre, only to throw them away one by one like a used orange. Vivien was also addicted to medication throughout much of her life, was prone to fits of despair and what doctors called 'hysteria' (mood-swings, possibly connected to an undiagnosed bipolar disorder, which used to be called 'manic depression') and would gossip about others behind her back. However, as Seymour-Jones points out, her steadfast love and admiration for her famous husband, T. S. Eliot, as his fame continued to grow over the years was incredible, and incredibly heart-breaking considering the lack of love from him and his treatment of her. She was devoted to him right to the very end. Despite her mental breakdown, there is a sense of dignity and nobility she carries with her to the grave.

The final chapters were hard to read actually because her own brother Maurice was the one who decided to have her committed to an asylum, even though many years later he realised that she was as sane as anyone else and admitted that it was a terrible mistake. Dying in an asylum, abandoned by your husband and family, without any children (because your husband was never able to give you any), your inheritance/money/estate in your brother's hands, your works confiscated, everyone thinking you are a lunatic when you are actually sane, and largely forgotten by society - it is a pretty sad and bleak way to go. It brought tears to my eyes thinking about Vivien's last days. And I once again thought - Eliot you rotten but talented scumbag.

I only have two minor gripes with this book - 1) there is the occasional moment when Seymour-Jones waxes Freudian. She refers to some very 'iffy' Freudian analysis and commentary to explain Eliot's or Vivien's psychological torpor, especially around 1922 when The Waste Land was written, and much of that came across as unconvincing - in fact some of it sounded like total BS to me. And some psychologists today would even question whether it is appropriate to quote Freud at all. This was a real shame for me because it was the only aspect that tarred it from being an absolutely wonderful biography. Fortunately, there were only a few moments in the book where this occurred and Seymour-Jones then corrected her course and went back to relying on Vivien's own notebooks and journals to compose her biography. 2) She claims that Ezra Pound's sexuality was also ambiguous but provides scant evidence to support this claim. It was the first time for me to hear this. Pound once jokingly said that people called him bisexual but Pound was famous for being facetious so this statement alone is not enough to prove this point. The fact that he was a great admirer of Eliot's work, including his highly sexual homoerotic writings on Captain Colombo and Bolo poems does not necessarily mean Pound was also gay. Pound was an incredibly open-minded person in the early days before he fell under the spell of Mussolini in the 1930s.

What I also learned from this book, which I didn't know previously, was how Eliot continued his pattern of 'deceiving' or 'stringing along' women who were attracted to him, even after Vivien passed on. Two examples are Emily Hale and Mary Trevelyan. Both women were in love with Eliot and he gave them cause to think the feeling was mutual. Both these women, like Vivien, wasted much of their time waiting for a proposal that never came. Mary ended up proposing to Eliot because he wouldn't 'strap on a pair' and do it himself. And of course he turned her down. For God's sake Eliot! Get a grip! I wanted to scream at him - let these poor women know you are only interested in men, and have no intention of marrying again, so they can save their time and move on. Poor old Emily Hale also became unhinged in the end. That's at least two strikes for you Eliot, you bastard. I'm glad the biography ended where it did because I could feel my anger at Eliot building up and up and up.

I may be wrong but I think the only reasons he married Valerie (his second wife) were 1) he didn't want to die alone (although that's probably what he deserved considering what happened to Vivien) and 2) to leave her with the job of being his literary executor and ensuring that she would hide as much of the truth as possible. However, thanks to people like Seymour-Jones, at last Vivien's spirit can rest a little as this biography goes a long way to restoring some justice to her tragic life, and one thing is for sure, I will never think of T. S. Eliot in the same way again - my admiration for him as a poet remains undiminished but as a person.................I'm glad I never met him. 'Nuff said.

[Ruth · Rating 3 out of 5]

I used to want to be reincarnated as part of the Bloomsbury Group. I've read a lot of books by and about them. They seemed such a free and fascinating lot. If half of what Painted Shadow says is true, I am forever disabused of that idea. Nasty, back-biting crew.

There are some writers who cannot bear to omit a single bit of the research they've done. Seymour-Jones appears to be one of these. I learned way more than I wanted to know about everyone and everything surrounding Vivienne Eliot. Sometimes I wondered if this wasn't really a bio of TS Eliot. Yes, yes, I know any bio of Viv has to include Tom, but this much?

Viv appears to have been nuttier than Planters, and Tom ran a close second. Neither of them comes off as anyone you'd like to live next door to.

[Carol Bachofner · Rating 5 out of 5]

This very frank biography of Vivienne Eliot is an eye-opener. I read this in London while there on a study abroad session. It made me question everything I thought I knew about TS Eliot and Ezra Pound. It is also a very poignant picture of what women of Vivienne's day suffered (in silence often) in terms of how their mental health was wrongly described by the men around them.

[Peter · Rating 3 out of 5]

Once again, for me, reading an in depth biography blows all the bloom off the rose. It turns out that T.S. Eliot, famous poet and prize winner, was a cad—an egotistical, vain, manipulative, Janus-faced cad. Of course, back then one had to hide or fight against one’s homosexuality, and no doubt this was often done by marriage, either to conceal one’s inclinations from society, or perhaps even, from one’s own self. Tom Eliot was not honest with himself or poor Vivienne, and British society discouraged such honesty. Vivienne was not the only victim of Eliot’s vortex of self-involvement. Several other members of his social group, people who had offered him support in his early career, but whom he deemed beneath him in intellect or ability—and that seems to have included just about his entire social circle, got the brush off or the boot when they were no longer useful to him, when they ceased to fit into his life plan. He would make room in his schedule and his secluded apartment for the (male) members of the Russian ballet, the French sailors, the pretty boys from school; he was vindictive not only when he was angrily drunk, and he never bothered to warn the women whom he led on that he was NOT INTERESTED in them. Because they were useful to him for the time being. I was pleased to find that at least Virginia Woolf and James Joyce bested him. Katherine Mansfield made a good showing. Bertrand Russell was a lesser cad. The jury is still out for me on Ezra Pound.

Not surprisingly, most of the free-love community of the Bloomsbury crowd, who were Eliot’s social milieu, end up in a mud sucking swamp of broken hearts and sniping. As I read about the jealously and sleeping around of these friends and couples, I came to realize that Muriel Spark’s Momento Mori is probably her depiction of the twilight of the Bloomsbury crowd. As my dad would say, “With all this nihilism, no wonder the Nazis came to power.” Or words to that effect… (sigh)

Unfortunately I cannot recommend this book. It is much too detailed and somewhat meandering. If only biography could be kept to a certain number of pages, forcing authors too summarize rather than list the daily blow-by-blow. Some chapters and sections were well written and got to the heart of the matter, some provided good social background, but then the correspondence and the daily schedule comes back to the fore and one’s eyes start to glaze as one reaches for the mug of coffee and realizes with chagrin that one’s daily allotment has run dry…

The Wasteland was about his pining for his first French love, killed with the British at Gallipoli, a death by water … and the strain of a faux marriage, especially when at least one half of the marriage (and perhaps even Eliot at times) has expectations of a real marriage.

With all due respect to the modern literature crowd, T. S. Eliot’s Wikipedia page needs a substantial re-write.

[Katlyn · Rating 1 out of 5]

I really hate not finishing books that I start, but to be honest, I'm about 65 pages in and probably won't finish. I started regretting the purchase about 12 pages in, and it has failed to convince me otherwise. As other critics have noted, "Painted Shadow" seems a fair description of Seymour-Jones' treatment of the subject. Poorly organized and with no coherent line of argument, the episodes she imagines contain little relevant support from her research; in fact, her claims often remain unsubstantiated by the corresponding quotes/paraphrases. This lack of strong evidence only emphasizes the heavily biased language she uses to tell the tale of this hapless, misunderstood woman. There may be some truth to the book's premise, but it is drowned out by the unnecessarily intimate and unfounded portrayal of the Eliots' history; I believe the critic who used the term "gossip" got it spot on. I don't think I've disliked a book or its style so much in a long time.

[Joanna Chen · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have a thing about T S Eliot, I admit. I got a kick out of reading the source of a lot of his poetry: whole phrases lifted out of other people's speech. I enjoyed the gossip as well about the Bloomsbury group. They were awfully busy, old fellow, mostly screwing each other.

[Jessica · Rating 3 out of 5]

Screw this book for making me hate T.S. Eliot and everyone else in the Bloomsbury Group.

[Dawn · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is one of the few instances where I would have infinitely preferred an abridgement to this big-ol'-book. Having really enjoyed 'Heroines' by Kate Zambreno I was excited to crack this book and know more about the first wife of Eliot and her involuntary confinement to an asylum. But things start slogging when V and TS get into Bloomsbury circles. It's a bunch of name-dropping and trivia for hundreds of pages. That's not really my dish. And the book trails off to Vivienne's confinement with nearly nothing about the last years of her life.
That said, if you're interested in the "TS Eliot was definitely gay" storyline, this is a must-read. I found myself rereading his poems (with this insight) and found more genuine sadness than I'd previously gleaned. They were devastating, actually. The man's life was really really sad. I also found a (great) YouTube recording of TS's play Sweeney Agonistes that I would have never read if this book hadn't piqued my interest.

[Stephen Butler · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an excellently researched and compelling biography of two people, not just Vivienne Eliot. It will take a week to read and some reviews argue it could have been more heavily edited. I disagree, although it is a detailed account of the lives of TS and V Eliot.
The book leaves one feeling a tragic sense of loss at the end and anger towards TS Eliot and Maurice (her brother) both of whom destroyed V's life through a narcissism and arrogance that was breathtaking. In another world or under different circumstances V would have been recognised as a competent writer, editor and poet; perhaps not of the first order, but er life could have been very different if she had not lived under the destructive shadow of TS.
Well worth the read.

[Bernadette Calonego · Rating 3 out of 5]

If I were an aficionado of dead British and American literati, I would have given this book 5 stars. Because in that case, I would have licked up all the immensely detailed descriptions of the famous poets and writers from Virgina Woolf to Ezra Pound.

But I really wanted to know more about Vivienne Eliot, the first wife of American-British poet T.S. Eliot. She deserves being written about, as this intriguing and talented woman was locked away in a psychiatric clinic by her husband (they never divorced) and by Vivienne`s own brother - although the brother later confessed that Vivienne had never been insane and he regretted the decision.

This book confirms once more that some famous writers and poets are not so perfect human beings, often nasty, cruel and petty. T.S. Eliot appears in a very bad light on these pages (and some other celebrities, too). He won the Nobel prize for literature, but then we all know that some writers who truly would have deserved the Nobel did not get it.

Vivienne Eliot is a tragic case, what happened to her seventy years ago could have happened to any rebellious, eccentric, obstinate woman who would not be silenced.
The most important truth (in my eyes) in the book: England had a long history of husbands who had their wives locked away in asylums when they wanted to get rid of them.

In this case, it was an American turned Brit (T.S.Eliot) who continued the horrid tradition.
Although Eliot tried to delete everything from his records that would stain his reputation (for instance the persistant rumours that he was a homosexual and would not consummate the marriage), his actions come to haunt him long after his death in 1965.

[Nicole · Rating 5 out of 5]

a remarkable and tragic woman

[Todd · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first half of the book drags with a lot more trivia than I really need to know.