The Hyacinth Girl

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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.