Review: (2) Ange Mlinko on an Eliot Centenary

Photo: T. S. Eliot and his publisher Virginia Woolf, 1924. By Ottoline Morrell (Wikimedia Commons)

Read Part One of this post here!
Two other books, sitting to the side of T. S. Eliot’s official biography, offer something a little less than celebratory. Lyndall Gordon’s The Hyacinth Girl is a five-hundred-page study of Eliot’s relationships with women. For many years, the story was that he was miserably wedded to the mentally ill Vivienne Haigh-Wood (they married in 1915; he separated from her in 1933 but wouldn’t divorce her for religious reasons; she died in an asylum in 1947); lived as a celibate with his housemate John Hayward; then in 1957 upped and married Valerie Fletcher, his secretary at Faber and Faber (forty years his junior, she may not have thought the elopement so abrupt: she had been planning to marry the great man since she heard his poetry on the radio at the age of fourteen). It was the second impulsive marriage he had made, and, though belated, it proved happy until his death eight years later.