She made it her mission to stay alive until the day they were made public: “Then and there I vowed to live to the day the letters would be released.” Gordon had first heard about this trove of letters (1,131 in all) in 1972 when she was a student. (Photo: Daily Express / Hulton Archive / Getty Images)īut in 1930, after the reality of a flawed love and marriage to Vivienne had bitten him, he initiated an intense correspondence with Emily – arising from a youthful nostalgia that had grown from that pure feeling of first love captured in a fragment of the The Waste Land:Īnd the letter writing continued until the late 1950s.
TS Eliot with his second wife, Valerie Fletcher, on 16 August 1958. But then he left her in the US to pursue his vision of becoming a great poet, starting out at Oxford in England. In December 1913, in the flurries of first love, Eliot had almost proposed to Hayle (“he very much embarrassed me by telling me he loved me deeply no mention of marriage was made”). Read Finuala Dowling’s Daily Maverick review: The Hyacinth Girl: T.S. Lyndall Gordon was one of the first readers. Two are known his two wives, Vivienne Haigh-Wood and Valerie Fletcher one, Mary Trevelyan, is less known.īut one, Emily Hale, was, until the making public of Eliot’s 1,000-plus letter correspondence with her, buried in boxes kept under seal for 50 years at Princeton University library, relatively unknown, until they were opened to readers on 2 January 2020.Įmily Hale is the Hyacinth girl.
However, the essence of The Hyacinth Girl is this: four women loved TS Eliot at different and concurrent points in his life. Indeed, a whole essay could be written on what this book makes us question about our preconceptions of love. (Photo by Simone Padovani/Awakening/Getty Images)
British-based academic writer Lyndall Gordon attends a photocall during the annual Edinburgh International Book Festival at Charlotte Square Gardens on Augin Edinburgh, Scotland.
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