The hyacinth girl T. S. Eliot's hidden muse

A trove of secret letters prompts a re-evaluation of T. S. Eliot's romantic relationships and their influence on his poetry. It is well known that Eliot maintained a decades-long transatlantic dalliance with Emily Hale, a Bostonian speech and drama teacher he met as a young graduate student. But the exact nature of their relationship has prompted intense critical debate. Unsealed in January 2020, 1,131 of Eliot's letters to Hale reveal an intense and evolving ardor. Hale was Eliot's confessor and muse, "the secret sharer of the hot moments of inception, the marvelous words that came to him, part of the drama he conceived and played out, before writing lines to last beyond his time." Despite a deep connection, their relationship was strained by Eliot's messy marriage to writer Vivienne Haigh-Wood, his increasingly fervent Anglo-Catholicism, and his ultimate refusal to marry Emily even after Vivienne's death. In Eliot's New Life (1988), Gordon anticipated Hale's key role in the poet's spiritual development, and this inquiry (besides providing the biographer with a well-deserved victory lap) allows her to find new coherence in Eliot's otherwise apparently fragmented interior life. Equally praiseworthy are Gordon's sensitive assessments of the other women who shaped Eliot's life, ailing Vivienne, religious companion Mary Trevelyan, and Valerie Fletcher, his second wife and custodian of his estate.

T.S. Eliot's oft-forgotten relationship with an American woman takes center stage in this illuminating account from Gordon (T.S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life). Using Eliot's letters to Emily Hale that were unsealed in the Princeton University archive in January 2020, Gordon traces their relationship and her Hale's as his muse, inspiring the hyacinth girl in The Wasteland and the Four Quartets. Eliot turned to her as his first marriage collapsed, and hoped their letters would serve as a sort of autobiography (though he ended up destroying much of Hale's correspondence to him). While a visit from Hale crossed into physical intimacy--she sat on his lap, he kissed her feet--Eliot ultimately recoiled against marriage and companionship, and later, having used Hale in a long "dance of possession and withdrawal," he married another woman. 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. "Eliot's letter to posterity left no opening for debate: the future must forget Emily Hale," Gordon writes. Literature lovers, take note. (Nov.)

Norton celebrates the centenary of T.S. Eliot's magisterial The Waste Land with three key titles. Thought lost until its 1968 acquisition by the New York Public Library, the original manuscript of the poem proved to be much longer than the standing version and was published in facsimile in 1971, as edited by Eliot's widow, Valerie. The Waste Land Facsimile is a new edition including an appendix of recently discovered corrections she intended to make and an afterword by Faber poetry editor Matthew Hollis; it comes from the Norton imprint Liveright--especially appropriate as The Waste Land was first published in the United States by Boni & Liveright. Costa Biography winner Hollis also weighs in with The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem, which reconstructs the poem's creation and shows how strife between the poet and Vivienne, his wife at the time, imbues the writing. In The Hyacinth Girl, Gordon (T.S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life) revisits the relationship between Eliot and Emily Hale, a drama teacher to whom he wrote more than 1,000 letters and who can be seen as the source of The Wasteland's "memory and desire."