Robert Crawford

Driven to distraction — the unhappy life of Vivien Eliot

T.S. Eliot’s first wife was a writer herself, but Ann Pasternak Slater seems neither to rate her prose nor sympathise with her highly-strung character

Vivien Eliot’s passport photograph, 1920. Credit: Alamy

Do you think your mother slept with T.S. Eliot? That was the question I needed to ask the 98-year-old in front of me. It wasn’t easy. I’d never met him before. After some preliminary chat, though, I realised this affable man knew exactly where our conversation was heading and had pondered the question a good deal himself.

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