The Hyacinth Girl

Among the greatest of poets, T. S. Eliot guarded his privacy. In public he was attached to three women: two wives and a companion in prayer. But concealed was an almost life-long love for an American: Emily Hale, a drama teacher to whom he wrote (and later suppressed) over a thousand letters. Hale was the source of 'memory and desire' in The Waste Land; she is the Hyacinth Girl. Drawing on the dramatic new material, the recently unsealed 1,131 letters Eliot wrote to Hale, leading biographer Lyndall Gordon retrieves Hale's silenced voice and reveals a hidden Eliot. She shows Emily Hale as the first and foremost woman of the poet's life - and at the heart of his art.Eliot's relationships were inextricable from his poems; Emily Hale was not the only woman who shaped his poetry and plays. Lyndall Gordon revisits and brings new insight to the stories of the other three : Vivienne, the flamboyant wife with whom Eliot shared a private wasteland; Mary Trevelyan, a war-time woman of action; and Valerie Fletcher, the young disciple to whom he proposed when Hale crossed him. Each of these women participated in his transformations as poet, expatriate, convert, and, finally, a man 'made for love'. Eliot kept these women apart. They barely knew one another but through the poet, their stories mesh. At the centre was Emily Hale in a love drama the poet conceived and the inspiration for the lines he wrote to last beyond their time; she was his hidden muse.