The Hyacinth Girl

Among the greatest of poets, T. S. Eliot protected his privacy while publicly associated with three women: two wives, Vivienne and Valerie, and a church-going companion, Mary Trevelyan. This presentation concealed a life-long love for an American: Emily Hale, a drama teacher who was the source of 'memory and desire' in The Waste Land; she is the Hyacinth Girl.


Drawing on the only recently unsealed 1,131 letters Eliot wrote to Hale and suppressed in his lifetime, leading biographer Lyndall Gordon reveals both the hidden poet and the muse who was the first and consistently important woman of life and his art. Emily Hale was at the centre of a love drama he conceived and the inspiration for the lines he wrote to last beyond their time.


'Thanks to her meticulous research and inspired storytelling we will never read Eliot's poems the same way again' Heather Clark, author of Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath


'Exquisitely nuanced' Kathryn Hughes, Sunday Times


'Gordon is a writer of high intelligence and deep sensibility, with an earnest interest in truth and justice... coupled with a moral seriousness that is never solemn' Richard Davenport-Hines, Literary Review


'Revelatory' Erica Wagner