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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.
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- Hardcover
How Hale was the “hyacinth girl” in “The Waste Land” and “a rose of Memory” in the Four Quartets. As Gordan tells us in her introduction, “to read Eliot’s letters to Emily during the thirties and early forties is to enter poems in the making.”
Gordon is unapologetically gleeful to find, right at the beginning of the correspondence in 1930, Eliot’s clear identification of Hale as The Waste Land’s “hyacinth girl” — previously, she observes, such conjectures provoked “annoyed reviews from men.” And she shows how Hale’s acknowledged presence in the poem can open up ...
Nov 7, 2022 · The two embarked on an unusually tortured marriage, becoming estranged and living separately until, in 1938, he helped have her committed to a mental hospital. As the marriage deteriorated, Hale ...
- Katie Roiphe
Nov 8, 2022 · Lyndall Gordon’s ‘The Hyacinth Girl’ is a remarkable achievement. Based on the 1,131 letters of TS Eliot to his lifelong muse, Emily Hale, it is the natural companion to and extension of, Gordon’s biography of Eliot, ‘The Imperfect Life of TS Eliot’.
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- Lyndall Gordon
Apr 9, 2023 · But as Lyndall Gordon reveals in her new book, The Hyacinth Girl, the recent release of 1,131 surviving letters between Eliot and Emily show they had the closest relationship of all even though never married. Emily Hale, not Vivienne, Mary, or Valerie, was Eliot’s muse.
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Dec 21, 2022 · The Hyacinth Girl: T.S. Eliot’s Hidden Muse has reached our shelves a mere two years later. It tells the story of a poet who needed women for their transformational power. Eliot’s first wife,...
