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 Eliotexplore 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.

The Hyacinth Girl makes clear that Hale was Eliot’s great love. They met in 1912 in Boston where he was a student at Harvard and she was studying singing. Gordon does a fine job describing the early days of their romance, including how they acted together in plays Hale wrote (in her adaptation of Emma, Eliot was cast as the hypochondriac Mr Woodhouse). There is little doubt that they were close, but with access to a ‘pencil- scrawled… first draft of a brief memoir’ Hale wrote, Gordon is finally able to quote Emily directly to reveal quite how close they were: ‘He very much embarrassed me by telling me he loved me deeply; no mention of marriage was made.’

Eliot moved to Britain to pursue his studies, where he met and married Vivienne Haigh-Wood. Their relationship was complicated and Gordon recognises that both Eliot and Vivienne were to blame for the marriage’s failure: her mental decline was exacerbated by Eliot’s lack of commitment. They held together primarily because both were devoted to his success (‘Vivienne kept him alive as a poet’) but she could not compete with Hale, the ‘third person in the marriage’. Hale, Gordon reveals, was the ‘Hyacinth girl’ in The Waste Land, the memory of whom distracts the narrator from the waste around him:

Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth
garden,
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed…

Vivienne, in Eliot’s mind, was more like the waste he wanted to avoid.

They separated in 1932. Meanwhile, he had been exchanging regular letters with Emily, including professions of love and requests that she comment on his work. In 1931 he told her: ‘I am not sorry for loving and adoring you, for it has given me the very best that I have in my life.’ Hale was the ‘lady of silences… the rose of memory’ in his poem ‘Ash Wednesday’. With these kind of details, it is hard to maintain the fig leaf of Eliot’s impersonality. Clearly his poems drew more deeply from his life than he cared to admit.

Emily could be forgiven for thinking that Eliot would propose, but she was wrong. When, in 1945, she wrote asking him to clarify their situation he responded ‘I should never want to marry anyone’, meaning that to remarry while Vivienne was still alive would conflict with his faith. He did, however, continue to love Hale; and after Vivienne’s death and after his relationship with Hale had cooled, he told Mary Trevelyan that he had ‘never wanted to marry anyone except this one person’. Gordon discusses this revelation in both The Hyacinth Girl and in T.S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life, but thanks to Mary & Mr Eliot we get more detail about how it was received.

Trevelyan and Eliot had become friends in the late 1930s. By 1950, their friendship had deepened to something like romance. Or at least it had for Mary. She was a tough, efficient woman who had travelled the world. After D-Day she ran a hostel close to the front where soldiers could rest. She and Eliot attended communion together, ate dinner with one another on a regular basis and exchanged frequent letters. Her perspective on the poet is narrow, and Wagner’s commentary is often necessary, adding important information and context that Mary couldn’t be aware of. What Mary lacks in perspective she makes up for in intimate detail. Her Tom, as she called Eliot, lies on the floor of the King’s state rooms to better ‘admire the painted ceiling’ and brings sausages for breakfast when he needs to apologise.

It was Mary who prompted Eliot’s confession about Hale, though at the time he didn’t reveal her name. Sick of being on her own, Mary had written to him to ask: ‘Why should we both be so lonely?’ At moments like these, Wagner gets out of the way so that Mary’s response of stoic heartbreak can resonate all the more:

I spent a bad afternoon and evening, but came through it and was able, by the time I saw him again, to look at the picture from a new angle.

She loved Eliot. He did not return her affection in the way she wanted. They remained friends until 1957 when, to Mary’s shock, he married Valerie Fletcher who had been his secretary at Faber. Wagner, understandably, can’t hide her disappointment in Eliot:

Where does one draw the line between privacy and deception? At this point it’s difficult not to believe that Eliot, in regard to what he shared with his friend Mary – who had stood by him through thick and thin for nearly two decades – was tilting towards the latter.

Eliot and Mary’s relationship would never recover and they lost touch.

What makes both books work well is their unrelenting focus on the women in the story. Often in biography the supporting cast is forgotten once the author’s gaze moves on and women can be ignored in favour of the men who play more traditional roles. This is not the case with either The Hyacinth Girl orMary & Mr Eliot. Ezra Pound, for example, is barely mentioned. Nor is Eliot’s work as a critic or publisher. Instead, Mary & Mr Eliot is a testament to Trevelyan, who, as Wagner goes to great lengths to point out, was much more than Eliot’s friend – her work with international students, for example, earned her a CBE – and while she does not feature in his work in the way that Hale does, it is impossible to read the book and not be struck by her energy, determination and strength.

Gordon, meanwhile, in her tracing of Hale’s life to its end – she never married and pursued a career as a teacher, actor and director – reminds us that she lived her own life, made her own choices and ‘would not want our pity’. She may have been Eliot’s Hyacinth girl but she was considerably more.

These books don’t undermine Eliot’s life or his achievement. Instead, they set him in a wider context, connecting him to the women who contributed so much to his success and paid a high price for doing so.