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The Hyacinth Girl: T.S. Eliot's Hidden Muse
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."
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."
512 pages, Hardcover
Published November 8, 2022
About the author
Lyndall Gordon
20 books121 followersLyndall Gordon (born 4 November 1941) is a British-based writer and academic, known for her literary biographies. She is a Senior Research Fellow at St Hilda's College, Oxford.
Born in Cape Town, she was an undergraduate at the University of Cape Town, then a doctoral student at Columbia University in New York City. She married the pathologist Siamon Gordon; they have two daughters.
Gordon is the author of Eliot's Early Years (1977), which won the British Academy's Rose Mary Crawshay Prize; Virginia Woolf: A Writer's Life (1984), which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize; Charlotte Brontë: A Passionate Life (1994), winner of the Cheltenham Prize for Literature; and Vindication: A Life of Mary Wollstonecraft, shortlisted for the BBC Four Samuel Johnson Prize. Her most recent publication is Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and her Family's Feuds (2010), which has overturned the established assumptions about the poet's life.
(from Wikipedia)
Born in Cape Town, she was an undergraduate at the University of Cape Town, then a doctoral student at Columbia University in New York City. She married the pathologist Siamon Gordon; they have two daughters.
Gordon is the author of Eliot's Early Years (1977), which won the British Academy's Rose Mary Crawshay Prize; Virginia Woolf: A Writer's Life (1984), which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize; Charlotte Brontë: A Passionate Life (1994), winner of the Cheltenham Prize for Literature; and Vindication: A Life of Mary Wollstonecraft, shortlisted for the BBC Four Samuel Johnson Prize. Her most recent publication is Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and her Family's Feuds (2010), which has overturned the established assumptions about the poet's life.
(from Wikipedia)
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Displaying 1 - 27 of 27 reviews
February 1, 2023
What a shocker this book is!
I appreciate art, of which I consider poetry and writing simply two of the many types of art that exist. This book illustrates, as others have also shown, that the behavior of artists is all too often out of bounds and completely unacceptable!
***********************
T.S. Eliot (1888-1965) was born in St. Louis, Missouri, to a prominent Boston Brahmin family. He moved to England in 1914, at the age of 25. He went on to settle, work, and marry there. He became a British citizen in 1927at the age of 39, subsequently renouncing his American citizenship. Eliot was not only a poet, but also a playwright, literary critic and editor. He is best known as a leader of the Modernist movement in poetry and as the author of the poems The Waste Land (1922) and Four Quartets (1943). 1,131 letters written by Eliot to Emily Hale, sequestered at Princeton until 2020, have been opened. Having read these letters, the author is now better able to judge Eliot's and Hale's relationship. After reading this book, I hope to understand both the man and his prose.
Now, after completing the book, I affirm that one is given a thorough picture of Eliot’s personality. What is drawn is not complimentary. I am left feeling somewhat uncomfortable. The author’s reasoning makes sense to me. What she is saying is convincing. Gordon’s analysis is backed by a large quantity of references.
The author focuses on Eliot’s relationship with important women in his life. I read first Young Eliot: From St. Louis to The Waste Land by Robert Crawford. Crawford’s book is the first of two. The second, which deals with the time period when most of Hale’s letters were written is unfortunately not yet available to me. Crawford, a poet and longtime analyst of Eliot, focuses more upon Eliot’s impressive academic studies and knowledge. Gordon’s and Crawford’s approach are quite different. Right off the bat one is struck by this. Gordon’s statements are initially viewed as being subjective. However, as one reads one cannot help but become convinced by that which she states. The real problem is that we cannot know for sure today what is correct and what is not. Two people rarely view a given event the same way!
Back to Gordon’s book. Four women are focused upon—Eliot’s first wife (Vivienne Haigh-Wood), Emily Hale whom he sent the archived Princeton letters to, a third woman (Mary Trevelyan) important to Eliot when he converted to Anglicanism and then finally his second wife, an adoring disciple (Valerie Fletcher). Their marriage was a huge surprise to all knew him. He was fifty eight. Valerie was almost thirty eight years his junior. Gordon analyzes all these relationships on the basis of known facts and by looking at Eliot’s poetry, articles and plays.
Eliot compartmentalized the four women. His deviousness and ultimately his success in keeping them apart is astounding. Eliot had an agenda. He sought to promote his fame for generations to come. It looks like he used these women to achieve this. Personally, I find his behavior revolting.
Gordon, at the book’s end, points out the value of Eliot’s poetry, in an attempt, I believe, to soften the criticism. This gives balance to the whole.
Buffy Davis narrates the audiobook I listened to. Many nowadays appreciate narrators that perform as though on stage, in front of an audience. This is however not what I am looking for. Me? I just want to hear the author’s words clearly and easily. I am not interested in their interpretation of the author’s lines. If I can hear the words, I’ll figure this out myself! I do not like narrators to dramatize. Buffy Davis does this. For me, her narration is thus simply OK. Two stars for the narration.
***********************
*The Hyacinth Girl: T.S. Eliot's Hidden Muse 4 stars by Lyndall Gordon
*Young Eliot: From St. Louis to The Waste Land 4 stars by Robert Crawford
*Eliot After "The Waste Land" TBR by Robert Crawford
I appreciate art, of which I consider poetry and writing simply two of the many types of art that exist. This book illustrates, as others have also shown, that the behavior of artists is all too often out of bounds and completely unacceptable!
***********************
T.S. Eliot (1888-1965) was born in St. Louis, Missouri, to a prominent Boston Brahmin family. He moved to England in 1914, at the age of 25. He went on to settle, work, and marry there. He became a British citizen in 1927at the age of 39, subsequently renouncing his American citizenship. Eliot was not only a poet, but also a playwright, literary critic and editor. He is best known as a leader of the Modernist movement in poetry and as the author of the poems The Waste Land (1922) and Four Quartets (1943). 1,131 letters written by Eliot to Emily Hale, sequestered at Princeton until 2020, have been opened. Having read these letters, the author is now better able to judge Eliot's and Hale's relationship. After reading this book, I hope to understand both the man and his prose.
Now, after completing the book, I affirm that one is given a thorough picture of Eliot’s personality. What is drawn is not complimentary. I am left feeling somewhat uncomfortable. The author’s reasoning makes sense to me. What she is saying is convincing. Gordon’s analysis is backed by a large quantity of references.
The author focuses on Eliot’s relationship with important women in his life. I read first Young Eliot: From St. Louis to The Waste Land by Robert Crawford. Crawford’s book is the first of two. The second, which deals with the time period when most of Hale’s letters were written is unfortunately not yet available to me. Crawford, a poet and longtime analyst of Eliot, focuses more upon Eliot’s impressive academic studies and knowledge. Gordon’s and Crawford’s approach are quite different. Right off the bat one is struck by this. Gordon’s statements are initially viewed as being subjective. However, as one reads one cannot help but become convinced by that which she states. The real problem is that we cannot know for sure today what is correct and what is not. Two people rarely view a given event the same way!
Back to Gordon’s book. Four women are focused upon—Eliot’s first wife (Vivienne Haigh-Wood), Emily Hale whom he sent the archived Princeton letters to, a third woman (Mary Trevelyan) important to Eliot when he converted to Anglicanism and then finally his second wife, an adoring disciple (Valerie Fletcher). Their marriage was a huge surprise to all knew him. He was fifty eight. Valerie was almost thirty eight years his junior. Gordon analyzes all these relationships on the basis of known facts and by looking at Eliot’s poetry, articles and plays.
Eliot compartmentalized the four women. His deviousness and ultimately his success in keeping them apart is astounding. Eliot had an agenda. He sought to promote his fame for generations to come. It looks like he used these women to achieve this. Personally, I find his behavior revolting.
Gordon, at the book’s end, points out the value of Eliot’s poetry, in an attempt, I believe, to soften the criticism. This gives balance to the whole.
Buffy Davis narrates the audiobook I listened to. Many nowadays appreciate narrators that perform as though on stage, in front of an audience. This is however not what I am looking for. Me? I just want to hear the author’s words clearly and easily. I am not interested in their interpretation of the author’s lines. If I can hear the words, I’ll figure this out myself! I do not like narrators to dramatize. Buffy Davis does this. For me, her narration is thus simply OK. Two stars for the narration.
***********************
*The Hyacinth Girl: T.S. Eliot's Hidden Muse 4 stars by Lyndall Gordon
*Young Eliot: From St. Louis to The Waste Land 4 stars by Robert Crawford
*Eliot After "The Waste Land" TBR by Robert Crawford
January 28, 2023
The effect is of a correspondent as a work of art: a Pygmalion of sorts chiselling a statue of a woman with whom he falls in love. It is as if Eliot were writing letters in order to elicit hers for the purpose of a posthumous record that is to surprise the world, catch attention and reinvigorate future readers.
Gordon has written a partial biography of T.S. Eliot focusing on his life-long relationship with Emily Hale. She's always had a role in his story but has sometimes been slighted and sidelined by biographers. What gives impetus to this work is the fact that an archive of Eliot's letters to Hale - over a thousand of them - were given in a bequest to Harvard with a condition that they shouldn't be opened until fifty years after the last correspondent had died: this was in 2020 and Gordon uses this collection to reorient the story of the Eliot-Hale relationship. It is, by any standards, a peculiar relationship, one that Eliot himself called 'abnormal'.
Gordon's own interests are clearly in the women with whom Eliot had his closest and most influential relationships: his troubled first wife, Vivienne; his transformative second wife who was very much younger than he was; and Emily Hale - friend, confidante, lover, though never fully in a physical sense due to Eliot's anguished celibacy and strong sense of religious sin.
With great deftness, Gordon navigates through Eliot's life and work, expecting us to already know the practical biographical outline so that she doesn't have to waste time on his stint as a bank clerk or his move to Faber, all of which is background to her real interests: the excavation of the emotional connection between him and Hale and the way he used elements of their relationship in his writing.
There's more than a whiff of classic madonna/whore (Vivienne/Emily) dichotomy in Eliot's thinking shaded by Dante's relationship to Beatrice in his Vita Nuova, where Eliot wants to construct Emily as the virginal ideal woman who can lead him to the source of divinity without making any serious dents in her chastity or his celibacy. All the same, he struggles with his own desires - and Emily is left hanging on for years, often on a different continent, sustained only by the letters on which this book is based.
It's a cruel, frequently dysfunctional relationship with Eliot considering himself the intellectual superior as well as the one with the greater control over himself and, preferably, Emily too. But there are periods of happiness for both of them, however few and far between - and, importantly, they comprise moments that we recognise as Eliot scavenges constantly for material which he re-uses in his writing, notably The Waste Land, Four Quartets and the disturbing play The Cocktail Party. There are times when Emily is acutely distressed to find her most private emotions unpeeled and displayed in one of Eliot's work and one of the theses of this book is about the extent to which Eliot drew on aspects of his life and relationships when shaping his poetry, even while covering the personal through erudition and elaborate networks of references and allusions. It's a little shocking to find snippets of real conversations, with Vivienne as well as Emily, appearing in familiar poems such as The Waste Land - giving an added rawness to poetry which Eliot strove hard himself to characterise as 'impersonal'.
Gordon is a fair and balanced writer, never sensationalises, but also has an eye for the flow of the work. She is meticulous in citing her sources and references, and my edition has about 200 pages of notes at the end. Some readers might find there's a bit too much relating of poetry but this makes a fine and convincing case for re-positioning Eliot as an unexpectedly 'confessional' poet.
October 25, 2022
I was a freshmen in college, prowling the library shelves, when I found the poetry of T. S. Eliot. His collected poems and plays sits, tattered and worn, on my shelf. I have the facsimile and transcript of the original manuscript of The Waste Land. But after reading The Hyacinth Girl, I feel like I need to go back and reread everything with this book in hand.
Over a thousand letters between the poet and Emily Hale, his muse for many years, were released to the public in 2020. What they reveal changes everything. Hale, along with Eliot’s first wife Vivienne, his relationship with Mary Trevelyan, and his second wife Valerie Fletcher, impacted his poetry in surprising ways. His plays drew upon his relationships, and the women recognized themselves in the characters.
These women loved Eliot. His treatment of Vivienne, Hale, and Mary show a side of the poet that is very disagreeable and reveals deep personality issues and existential conflict. He came to abhor his first wife and her demands. He claimed to love Hale while keeping distant; after embracing Anglicism, he adopted stringent ideas about divorce. His friendship with Trevelyan broke her heart; he claimed he was in love with Hale. And then, when Vivienne died, he pulled back from Hale and Mary, only to suddenly marry his secretary, Valerie, who was half his age. She had been infatuated with Eliot through his poetry before she worked for him. She had no demands. He was writing no more poetry. And she had a natural sexuality that brought him, late in life, sexual fulfillment.
Eliot clearly used Vivienne and Hale for poetic reasons. He said that Vivienne drove him crazy but she was good for his poetry, while he knew that being with Hale would ‘destroy’ it. He wasn’t looking for happiness. His extreme religious views enforced ideas that brought unhappiness.
What an eye-opening book. I almost wish I had not read it, for in ignorance I had a better opinion of Eliot the man.
I received a free egalley from the publisher though NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.
Over a thousand letters between the poet and Emily Hale, his muse for many years, were released to the public in 2020. What they reveal changes everything. Hale, along with Eliot’s first wife Vivienne, his relationship with Mary Trevelyan, and his second wife Valerie Fletcher, impacted his poetry in surprising ways. His plays drew upon his relationships, and the women recognized themselves in the characters.
These women loved Eliot. His treatment of Vivienne, Hale, and Mary show a side of the poet that is very disagreeable and reveals deep personality issues and existential conflict. He came to abhor his first wife and her demands. He claimed to love Hale while keeping distant; after embracing Anglicism, he adopted stringent ideas about divorce. His friendship with Trevelyan broke her heart; he claimed he was in love with Hale. And then, when Vivienne died, he pulled back from Hale and Mary, only to suddenly marry his secretary, Valerie, who was half his age. She had been infatuated with Eliot through his poetry before she worked for him. She had no demands. He was writing no more poetry. And she had a natural sexuality that brought him, late in life, sexual fulfillment.
Eliot clearly used Vivienne and Hale for poetic reasons. He said that Vivienne drove him crazy but she was good for his poetry, while he knew that being with Hale would ‘destroy’ it. He wasn’t looking for happiness. His extreme religious views enforced ideas that brought unhappiness.
What an eye-opening book. I almost wish I had not read it, for in ignorance I had a better opinion of Eliot the man.
I received a free egalley from the publisher though NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.
December 4, 2022
So satisfying and confirming! Lyndall Gordon is one of my scholar heroes. She wrote a lovely biography of Virginia Woolf, balanced and perceptive. Then she convinced the Eliot estate to allow her to use and even quote some from his early unpublished work and wrote a brilliant biographic treatment of his early years, leading up to the Waste Land. Another installment followed, which was then combined into a magisterial biography. Now that the over-1000 letters to Emily Hale, sequestered at Princeton until 2020 have been opened to scholars, this book tells the full story of Eliot's love for and use of Hale as a muse, prompt for poetry, and spiritual traveling companion. In presenting the story, Gordon shows the grace, empathy, and balanced judgement that first convinced the Eliot estate to trust her. The story is fundamentally sad; one aches for Emily Hale who was used quite ruthlessly by Eliot. And yet, Gordon's insight is so gentle, her respect for (and knowledge of) Eliot's poetry is so deep that she almost makes us for give him.
January 25, 2024
Oh the waste sad time.
Things ill done and done to others, indeed.
Things ill done and done to others, indeed.
March 3, 2023
The world only learned of their 16 year relationship in 2020 when the letters T.S. Eliot wrote to Emily Hale were unsealed. Hale donated these letters to the Princeton University Library with a 50 year restriction at Eliot’s request. (Eliot had the ones she wrote to him destroyed).
As in life, in this book, Hale takes a back seat to the famous poet. Their relationship was a romantic correspondence, (she in the US, he in England) punctuated with short visits here and there. She contributed to his poetry in both suggested phrases and adding perspective. Some poems have shared experiences. While you get only one side of the correspondence, he professes his great love for her, she was clearly his muse.
The long distance relationship suited Eliot just fine. He was not proud of his domestic situation, and he could avoid guilt and shame since Hale would not see his treatment of his wife. He seemed to fear his sexuality and distance meant that he would not have to deal with abstinence every day. He was a writer… and maybe he was just in love with writing.
Eliot has clearly chosen a woman of quality. She appears to be always honest, thoughtful, considerate and intelligent.
She is able to keep working as an instructor (both college and high school), an actor and director through the 1930’s depression. This a credit to anyone, particularly a woman without a college degree. She moves about the country for this work since most positions are temporary. She is not well paid, she has a great voice, and her plays get rave reviews but there is nothing about her approach, teaching philosophy, management of a cast and crew or style. There is little about her family. You don’t get to know her at all.
She endures Eliot’s sexism, which seems to be more negative than the (low) standards for the day. There are many digs and put downs in these “love letters” - She does not send him pictures of her theatrical roles just to avoid his comments. She seems to accept that even when they are on the same continent, seeing her is not always high on his list. What did she know of his treatment of his wife, Vivienne? Only once she asked for a professional boost from this famous friend, and it was rejected. One of his plays “The Cocktail Party’ thinly disguises her hurt when he “changed” their relationship.
You cannot know Hale well through this book, but you can learn enough about Eliot to find him disgusting. His treatment of his first wife Vivienne is appalling. Vivienne has writing talent, which he does his best to mitigate. She is very needy and he seems to enjoy giving her a cold shoulder. He committed her to an institution and cowardly would shrink from responsibility.
After his abrupt “change” of his relationship with Hale, he became close to Mary, another spirited woman who ran relief efforts in WWI. Religion is a big part of this relationship and they pray often together. Eliot dropped her as precipitously as he dropped Hale. The 4th significant relationship, Valerie, whom he married, was 30+ years his junior. She became the keeper of his flame.
There are many b & w photos, some glossy and some on the matte pages they help you visualize the people and times. The index is very detailed.
Author Lyndall Gordon has done her homework. She weaves material from the 1,131 letters into a chronology showing how the material relates to Eliot’s work and life. The more you know of the Eliot canon, the better your understanding of the material will be. The writing is academic with a lot of detail.
If you are an Eliot reader, you may want to read this book. Be warned, that if you have him on a pedestal, he will not be there very far into this.
As in life, in this book, Hale takes a back seat to the famous poet. Their relationship was a romantic correspondence, (she in the US, he in England) punctuated with short visits here and there. She contributed to his poetry in both suggested phrases and adding perspective. Some poems have shared experiences. While you get only one side of the correspondence, he professes his great love for her, she was clearly his muse.
The long distance relationship suited Eliot just fine. He was not proud of his domestic situation, and he could avoid guilt and shame since Hale would not see his treatment of his wife. He seemed to fear his sexuality and distance meant that he would not have to deal with abstinence every day. He was a writer… and maybe he was just in love with writing.
Eliot has clearly chosen a woman of quality. She appears to be always honest, thoughtful, considerate and intelligent.
She is able to keep working as an instructor (both college and high school), an actor and director through the 1930’s depression. This a credit to anyone, particularly a woman without a college degree. She moves about the country for this work since most positions are temporary. She is not well paid, she has a great voice, and her plays get rave reviews but there is nothing about her approach, teaching philosophy, management of a cast and crew or style. There is little about her family. You don’t get to know her at all.
She endures Eliot’s sexism, which seems to be more negative than the (low) standards for the day. There are many digs and put downs in these “love letters” - She does not send him pictures of her theatrical roles just to avoid his comments. She seems to accept that even when they are on the same continent, seeing her is not always high on his list. What did she know of his treatment of his wife, Vivienne? Only once she asked for a professional boost from this famous friend, and it was rejected. One of his plays “The Cocktail Party’ thinly disguises her hurt when he “changed” their relationship.
You cannot know Hale well through this book, but you can learn enough about Eliot to find him disgusting. His treatment of his first wife Vivienne is appalling. Vivienne has writing talent, which he does his best to mitigate. She is very needy and he seems to enjoy giving her a cold shoulder. He committed her to an institution and cowardly would shrink from responsibility.
After his abrupt “change” of his relationship with Hale, he became close to Mary, another spirited woman who ran relief efforts in WWI. Religion is a big part of this relationship and they pray often together. Eliot dropped her as precipitously as he dropped Hale. The 4th significant relationship, Valerie, whom he married, was 30+ years his junior. She became the keeper of his flame.
There are many b & w photos, some glossy and some on the matte pages they help you visualize the people and times. The index is very detailed.
Author Lyndall Gordon has done her homework. She weaves material from the 1,131 letters into a chronology showing how the material relates to Eliot’s work and life. The more you know of the Eliot canon, the better your understanding of the material will be. The writing is academic with a lot of detail.
If you are an Eliot reader, you may want to read this book. Be warned, that if you have him on a pedestal, he will not be there very far into this.
April 13, 2024
I would be amazed if anyone came out of this book with a higher regard for T.S. Eliot than they had going into it. Stimulated by a huge cache of letters to his compatriot, and for many years, beloved and ideal, Emily Hale, released by the Princeton archive in 2020, Lyndall Gordon has produced a revelatory biography centring on his relationships with four key women in his life: his first wife Vivienne, Emily Hale, his churchgoing friend Mary Trevelyan, and his second wife Valerie. All of them were in love with him at one time or another, all except the last were let down and betrayed.
Eliot typifies the religious personality at its worst, a screen for relentless self-absorption and selfishness. If one is paying rapt attention to the voices in the next room, one can hardly be expected to worry much about the feelings of the little people at one’s feet. Eliot destroyed Hale’s letters to himself, but even if he hadn’t, I doubt the sense of an utterly self-involved individual, intent on personal sainthood (which of course didn’t materialize) would be much reduced. Just when I thought he couldn’t behave any more shabbily, he got shabbier, and then shabbier again. This is a man who, hot on the heels of arranging for Vivienne to be committed, attended a costume party as Dr. Crippen.
At several points in this gripping story, I was pulled up short by an outsider’s clear-eyed view of Eliot’s spiritual worritings. A Bloomsbury associate named Prince Mirsky noted his ‘deep phobia of life’ and that what he sought in religion was ‘purity free from vitality.’ The critic Edmund Wilson characterized him as ‘an actor. He gives you the creeps a little at first because he is such a completely artificial, or rather, self-invented character… but he had done such a perfect job with himself that you often end up admiring him.’ His older brother Henry saw an ‘irresistible, instinctive, more or less unconscious talent for publicity’ underlying the conversion to Anglicanism. Mary Trevelyan concluded that ‘Tom has always been a great “runner-away” – he is extremely deceitful when it suits him and he would willingly sacrifice anybody and anything to get himself out of something which he doesn’t want to face up to.’ Emily Hale, hearing of his old man’s marriage, observed calmly that ‘a great writer has behaved like a very usual human being: in his older years found a very young and attractive woman to take care of him, putting aside all else.’
However, the poetry remains, and I will never not love Prufrock and The Waste Land.
Eliot typifies the religious personality at its worst, a screen for relentless self-absorption and selfishness. If one is paying rapt attention to the voices in the next room, one can hardly be expected to worry much about the feelings of the little people at one’s feet. Eliot destroyed Hale’s letters to himself, but even if he hadn’t, I doubt the sense of an utterly self-involved individual, intent on personal sainthood (which of course didn’t materialize) would be much reduced. Just when I thought he couldn’t behave any more shabbily, he got shabbier, and then shabbier again. This is a man who, hot on the heels of arranging for Vivienne to be committed, attended a costume party as Dr. Crippen.
At several points in this gripping story, I was pulled up short by an outsider’s clear-eyed view of Eliot’s spiritual worritings. A Bloomsbury associate named Prince Mirsky noted his ‘deep phobia of life’ and that what he sought in religion was ‘purity free from vitality.’ The critic Edmund Wilson characterized him as ‘an actor. He gives you the creeps a little at first because he is such a completely artificial, or rather, self-invented character… but he had done such a perfect job with himself that you often end up admiring him.’ His older brother Henry saw an ‘irresistible, instinctive, more or less unconscious talent for publicity’ underlying the conversion to Anglicanism. Mary Trevelyan concluded that ‘Tom has always been a great “runner-away” – he is extremely deceitful when it suits him and he would willingly sacrifice anybody and anything to get himself out of something which he doesn’t want to face up to.’ Emily Hale, hearing of his old man’s marriage, observed calmly that ‘a great writer has behaved like a very usual human being: in his older years found a very young and attractive woman to take care of him, putting aside all else.’
However, the poetry remains, and I will never not love Prufrock and The Waste Land.
October 27, 2023
I have mixed feelings about this book. First of all, I hope it hasn’t ruined Four Quartets for me. Gordon invites us to peek behind the curtain, identifying certain lines in the poems with Eliot’s experiences with Emily Hale, the hyacinth girl. Since Eliot was controlling, demanding, repressed, evasive and disingenuous to her, it’s difficult to read the poems now without some distaste. I like to think I’ll get over this, though.
Sometimes the book felt like mere reportage - summaries of Eliot’s letters to Hale. But it also offered tremendous insights into the way a person’s life is documented, and how flimsy our knowledge of people is, dependent as it is on the preservation of written evidence.
I had expected the book to focus primarily on Emily Hale and I dreaded each new woman in Eliot’s life as a usurper, but Gordon does an excellent job of being fair. I ended up liking each woman, even Valerie, Eliot’s second wife who displaces the other women in Eliot’s heart/history. As each woman plays an important role in Eliot’s life, we see that no one person can be everything to someone else. Humans are far too complex (plus, it would be exhausting). Eliot seemed almost to be performing a pilgrimage from one woman to another, learning more about himself and (eventually!!) healing some of the misogyny and puritanism that kept him divorced from his own sexual appetites.
Some of my favorite parts - although too brief, I thought - were Gordon’s descriptions of her discovery that the letters existed and her experiences as she sat down on January 2, 2020 to read them in the Princeton library.
Sometimes the book felt like mere reportage - summaries of Eliot’s letters to Hale. But it also offered tremendous insights into the way a person’s life is documented, and how flimsy our knowledge of people is, dependent as it is on the preservation of written evidence.
I had expected the book to focus primarily on Emily Hale and I dreaded each new woman in Eliot’s life as a usurper, but Gordon does an excellent job of being fair. I ended up liking each woman, even Valerie, Eliot’s second wife who displaces the other women in Eliot’s heart/history. As each woman plays an important role in Eliot’s life, we see that no one person can be everything to someone else. Humans are far too complex (plus, it would be exhausting). Eliot seemed almost to be performing a pilgrimage from one woman to another, learning more about himself and (eventually!!) healing some of the misogyny and puritanism that kept him divorced from his own sexual appetites.
Some of my favorite parts - although too brief, I thought - were Gordon’s descriptions of her discovery that the letters existed and her experiences as she sat down on January 2, 2020 to read them in the Princeton library.
November 30, 2024
The first full-length reassessment of TS Eliot's work in light of the recently opened archive of his 1,131 letters to Emily Hale, the lifelong concealed and unconsummated love whom Eliot ultimately spurned at precisely the moment (Vivienne Eliot's death) they finally might have come together.
Spoiler: we have been reading Eliot profoundly wrong this entire time. Nearly all of the Images We Remember from the poems and plays are recycled from events shared between Hale and Eliot. Roses in the garden, The Hyacinth Girl, quick now, here, always... all of these are Hale, and now we can prove it.
Lyndall Gordon goes further to map very convincing parallels between the plots of the plays with major events occurring contemporaneously between Hale and Eliot.
It seems very much to me as if Eliot psychologically tortured not only Emily Hale, but also his first wife, Vivienne Eliot, and then later Mary Trevelyan, in order to extract emotional content from them that he recycled into his literary work.
There is not much here to recommend Eliot, the man. The evidence of the Hale letters shows him to be a manipulative, grasping, and sadistic monster. Today we might call him a malignant narcissist.
We mostly don't know what Hale said to him. After promising for years to deposit her letters along with his papers at the Yale Beinecke library, in the end he burned them.
Or more precisely, caused someone else to burn them on his behalf. Coward to the end.
Spoiler: we have been reading Eliot profoundly wrong this entire time. Nearly all of the Images We Remember from the poems and plays are recycled from events shared between Hale and Eliot. Roses in the garden, The Hyacinth Girl, quick now, here, always... all of these are Hale, and now we can prove it.
Lyndall Gordon goes further to map very convincing parallels between the plots of the plays with major events occurring contemporaneously between Hale and Eliot.
It seems very much to me as if Eliot psychologically tortured not only Emily Hale, but also his first wife, Vivienne Eliot, and then later Mary Trevelyan, in order to extract emotional content from them that he recycled into his literary work.
There is not much here to recommend Eliot, the man. The evidence of the Hale letters shows him to be a manipulative, grasping, and sadistic monster. Today we might call him a malignant narcissist.
We mostly don't know what Hale said to him. After promising for years to deposit her letters along with his papers at the Yale Beinecke library, in the end he burned them.
Or more precisely, caused someone else to burn them on his behalf. Coward to the end.
July 18, 2023
I have extremely mixed feelings about this book. It stoked a huge amount of anger in me, especially about how little the monstrous beliefs/behavior of Eliot is generally discussed, including, for example, when he's being taught in high school (if he still is--Prufrock was definitely part of the curriculum when I was in high school, and neither Eliot's anti-Semitism nor the misogyny in his writing about and treating women were mentioned--perhaps this has changed).
The book was compelling in its portrait of Emily Hale. But frankly it made excuses for Eliot throughout that I could not stomach. I also find it really bizarre to read a book that is explicitly about Eliot's love and sex life that never mentions the possibility that he may have been queer. I'm not saying I believe Gordon needed to take a definitive position on whether he was but given the focus of the book and the known facts of Eliot's life it reads as strange and bordering on homophobic not to mention this possibility.
The book was compelling in its portrait of Emily Hale. But frankly it made excuses for Eliot throughout that I could not stomach. I also find it really bizarre to read a book that is explicitly about Eliot's love and sex life that never mentions the possibility that he may have been queer. I'm not saying I believe Gordon needed to take a definitive position on whether he was but given the focus of the book and the known facts of Eliot's life it reads as strange and bordering on homophobic not to mention this possibility.
March 5, 2023
A masterful study of Eliot's secret relationship with the young woman who inspired him. Clear eyed, learned, absolutely brilliant, Lyndall Gordon is the perfect writer to assess the newly unsealed letters of Eliot to Emily Hale. Like Gordon's extraordinary study of Henry James, this is a book about love, obsession, cruelty, deep misogyny, and the mysteries of creativity. The poet wants what he wants, and takes what he must. His work flourishes, even as he denies his muse the real world happiness she wants and deserves. Somehow Gordon does Eliot justice as an artist, even as she records his sick (and I think rather muddled) ideas about women and religion. How does Gordon achieve this tricky balance and develop this layered and nuanced portrait? She succeeds because she is an artist too. Biography is her art.
December 18, 2024
The art and the artist. Can you separate one from the other? The poetry of T.S. Eliot is considered some of the greatest of the 20th century and this book seeks to pull back the curtain on the man who created it. The man himself doesn’t shine with his marriage to the wrong woman, his protracted selfish relationship with another and poor behavior with others. Eliot comes across as a person struggling with his faith and religion while allowing it to dictate (or excuse) his actions. I came away feeling sorry for the “Hyacinth girl” after the book was done. A familiarity with Eliot’s poems is helpful in the reading of the book.
June 1, 2023
it feels like gordon was racing to get this out, sloppily copy-edited with some sentences so poorly written i couldn't actually work out what she was saying. the few readings of the poetry she does offer are very surface level and it's a little floridly overwritten. i would have preferred a shorter tighter book because it's interesting material, but she also inserted the stuff about trevelyan vivienne and valerie which resulted in some jumbled chronology, as if she'd folded in another book about the other 3 women into her initial draft solely focused on hale
June 29, 2025
Having done some research on Emily Hale in the Scripps College archives in 2012, I was primed for the release of her correspondence with Eliot on schedule in 2020. Gordon's dive into the letters is sensitive and compassionate. Hale was definitely misused by the poet, who all but promised marriage if he were ever free, and then cut and run once his wife died. I have little interest in Eliot, but the extent of Hale's influence on his art, as revealed in the letters, must be revelatory to his admirers, along with his self-involved jackassery.
October 28, 2024
I've finished reading the Hyacinth Girl by Lyndall Gordon. This draws on the letters TS Eliot wrote to Emily Hale and suppressed in his lifetime and which were made public in 2020. It is an absolutely revelatory book and has changed the way I think about my favourite poet. It was Emily Hale who mixed memory with desire and who was the lady of silences, calm and distressed, the rose of memory, rose of forgetfulness. An astonishing and emotional read about a master of misdirection.
February 20, 2023
A really extraordinary and deeply considered account of the women around Eliot (adding to my impression that he really was an awful person, gifted as he may have been--not that that is ever mutually exclusive!). Lyndall Gordon was one of the lucky few to have access to the Hale letters as soon as they were made available, and what a gift that she was.
May 2, 2023
The book was interesting, and well written. Because of access to letters jazzy written by TS Elliot and archived, the author was able to present a relationship and a side of Elliot that had never been revealed. What little of Elliot‘s poetry I’ve read, I have not really enjoyed and after reading this book, I don’t like him very much.
January 28, 2024
This is a detailed description of his life handicapped by neuroses and emotional problems that are left to fester, almost like he was a spoiled child in his 20’s and 30’s. The way he treated women, and then asked to be forgiven; his inability to say what was really on his mind… I couldn’t keep going.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
August 19, 2024
Simply astonished to see what a prodigious amount of scholarly work this is, after the Imperfect Life. I wish I had known more then...All of it has become a delicate dream, with a beginning in Little Gidding and an end at Burnt Norton, exactly the reverse order, the last line being said in commemoration of Emily and the rose of memory.
March 5, 2023
Finally finished it because it was Lyndall so
Did include lots of info that’s overlapped with other books but hey it’s Eliot
Did include lots of info that’s overlapped with other books but hey it’s Eliot
December 4, 2023
Extraordinary ... my favourite book of 2023.
February 29, 2024
Insightful into Elliot, his character, life and loves, his passionate voice giving a different, more drawing stance for me towards his poems ans writings .Glad to have read.
March 10, 2024
An insight into a great poet’s life as distracted unhappy man and is impact on the women in his life . Mother , wife muse.
June 19, 2024
I am ready to murder this man and I will raise him from the dead to do it
July 10, 2024
Wow. Sometimes you think you know a guy, and then a giant batch of letters are released. A significant work of scholarship that lets us know the poet and the women in his life in a new way.
August 26, 2024
Fascinating. At times boring. But what an unexpected story! Massive biography infused with an abundance of knowledge and rigorous research.
December 17, 2024
DNF p. 162. Very anecdotal. not very analytical. kind of soured Eliot's poetry for me. This could have just been an essay.
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