Tom Williams

The lonely passions of Emily Hale and Mary Trevelyan

The stories of two remarkable women who hoped – with good reason – to marry T.S. Eliot show the poet in an unfamiliar light

Emily Hale – the Hyacinth girl of The Waste Land and T.S. Eliot’s great love. [Smith College Special Collections]

This year marks the centenary of the publication of The Waste Land, the poem that made T.S. Eliot famous. His story is familiar and yet still surprising. What is well known: Ezra Pound whipped The Waste Land into shape, it was published in The Dial and then The Criterion, and it was quickly recognised as a poem of great importance. Eliot emerged as the poet of his age and his views on the ‘impersonality’ of poetry would dominate the next several decades of poetry and criticism. What is less well known is how Eliot’s work was shaped and influenced by a few key women. This dynamic is what Lyndall Gordon’s The Hyacinth Girl and Mary Trevelyan and Erica Wagner’s Mary & Mr Eliot set out to explore.

Gordon has written about Eliot before. Her biography of him, T.S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life, is traditional. The Hyacinth Girl is not. It focuses on Emily Hale, who, Gordon argues, inspired parts of The Waste Land and several other poems. Hale was no secret to biographers – she features as a likely love interest in T.S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life — but letters between her and Eliot were under embargo until 2020. Now that the embargo is lifted, Gordon has found new evidence to examine Eliot’s relationship with Hale as well as with three other women in his life: his first wife, Vivienne; his second, Valerie; and Mary Trevelyan, a woman who advised international students.

Trevelyan wrote a memoir that was never published, The Pope of Russell Square, about her experience with Eliot, and Gordon references this extensively. Until now it has only been available to scholars, but Mary & Mr Eliot presents the text of the book, interwoven with letters between Eliot and Trevelyan and Wagner’s own commentary. Together, The Hyacinth Girl and Mary & Mr Eliot explore some of the most significant relationships of Eliot’s life, and by shifting the focus to these women a less familiar Eliot emerges – one who can be cold and austere as well as warm and affectionate, and whose friendship came at a considerable cost.

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