Description

Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature T S Eliot was considered the greatest Englishlanguage 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 Hales role as the first and foremost woman of the poets life tracing the ways in which their ardor and his idealization figured in his art For Eliots 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 Eliots 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 manjudgmental duplicitous intensely conflicted and indubitably brilliantbut 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