Publishers Weekly
★ 09/26/2022
T.S. Eliot’s oft-forgotten relationship with an American woman takes center stage in this illuminating account from Gordon (T.S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life). Using Eliot’s letters to Emily Hale that were unsealed in the Princeton University archive in January 2020, Gordon traces their relationship and her Hale’s as his muse, inspiring the hyacinth girl in The Wasteland and the Four Quartets. Eliot turned to her as his first marriage collapsed, and hoped their letters would serve as a sort of autobiography (though he ended up destroying much of Hale’s correspondence to him). While a visit from Hale crossed into physical intimacy—she sat on his lap, he kissed her feet—Eliot ultimately recoiled against marriage and companionship, and later, having used Hale in a long “dance of possession and withdrawal,” he married another woman. If this fine and entertaining account leaves readers shocked by instances of Eliot’s theatrical and self-serving misogyny (he “felt burdened by women”), it also treats the women in his life with dignity and goes a long way in reversing the erasure he attempted. “Eliot’s letter to posterity left no opening for debate: the future must forget Emily Hale,” Gordon writes. Literature lovers, take note. (Nov.)
Michael North
"The Hyacinth Girl is an elegant meditation on the women whose lives were fundamental to the life of T. S. Eliot. Lyndall Gordon has given us the fullest account yet of Eliot’s strained and distant relationship with his onetime sweetheart Emily Hale, kept dangling for decades as he grew more eminent and more remote, and one of the most detailed, vivid pictures of his nightmare marriage to Vivienne Haigh-Wood, who was ultimately committed to a sanatorium against her will. Together with her account of Eliot’s subsequent marriage to Valerie Fletcher, who had been his secretary, these give a painfully intimate look at the poet, one that also results in significant reassessments of his most imposing poems."
Katie Roiphe
"Vibrant.…There is a human richness to Eliot’s cerebral poetry that we can appreciate more in the context of his knotted emotional life, and Gordon’s art is in drawing this out."
Leo Damrosch
"In an engrossing study of art refracting life, Lyndall Gordon explores the conflicted emotions that Eliot translated into his ostensibly impersonal art. Making superb use of his letters to the hitherto shadowy Emily Hale that were released after a sixty-year embargo, Gordon tells the story of a lifelong love, sustained but resisted, that lay hidden beneath his marriages with the troubled Vivienne and the adoring Valerie."
starred review Booklist
"[Gordon finds] new coherence in Eliot’s otherwise apparently fragmented interior life. Equally praiseworthy are Gordon’s sensitive assessments of the other women who shaped Eliot’s life."
Miranda Seymour
"Lyndall Gordon is the first biographer to uncover the life of T. S. Eliot’s hidden muse, the inspiration for one of his greatest works of poetry. Gordon’s fairminded and declarative approach works perfectly for a story that gives the reader a shocked understanding of the way that a literary genius was ready to banish the women he loved when they no longer served his purpose. This is a work that will change the way that Eliot is seen."
Anita Patterson
"In this splendid biography, Lyndall Gordon offers a comprehensive, balanced account of T. S. Eliot’s hidden love for Emily Hale set in relation to his poetry, spiritual journey, and three other important women in his life—Vivienne Haigh-Wood Eliot, Mary Trevelyan, and Valerie Fletcher Eliot. Drawing on an immense archive of previously embargoed Eliot-Hale correspondence, Gordon shows how each of these women played a uniquely transformative role in the maturation of Eliot’s poetry and faith. An indispensable study that will inspire new perspectives on Eliot’s life and work for generations to come."
New Statesman - Margaret Drabble
"Gordon’s account of the fate of these two caches is as exciting as a detective story. She catches the drama of the sealed boxes brilliantly. But it is the story behind—or rather within—the boxes that makes these revelations so important."
Katie Roiphe (Editors' Choice)
"Vibrant.... In narrating [Eliot’s] romantic attachments, [Gordon] captures his manipulations, his selfishness, what she calls his ‘cruelty,’ without abandoning her mission to understand him and his writing.... There is a human richness to Eliot’s cerebral poetry that we can appreciate more in the context of his knotted emotional life, and Gordon’s art is in drawing this out."
Colm Tóibín
"Extraordinary.... The Hyacinth Girl is a rare work of sympathy and insight. Lyndall Gordon’s passionately intelligent engagement with the letters between T. S. Eliot and Emily Hale is matched by her close reading of Eliot’s poems. Her ability to see both complexity and simplicity in the relationship between Eliot and Hale means that their entangled world comes fully alive in this brilliant book."
Benjamin Moser
"Like an unopened Egyptian tomb, a trove of T. S. Eliot’s letters has lurked for decades in a Princeton library. Lyndall Gordon has now cracked it open, and in The Hyacinth Girl reveals a treasure of new insights into this most emblematic modern poet. If you thought you knew Eliot, think again."
Heather Clark
"There is no finer guide into the mind of T.S. Eliot than Lyndall Gordon…[A] revelatory work from one of our greatest biographers."
Sunday Times (UK) - Kathryn Hughes
"Exquisitely nuanced.... Careful not to judge either Eliot or his women. While the reader longs to scream at Hale and Trevelyan to just walk away, you are also left with the sneaking suspicion that being present at the making of work that shook the 20th century was probably—just—worth the humiliation and heartache."
Jahan Ramazani
"Drawing on fresh revelations, Lyndall Gordon’s superb book brims with insight into T. S. Eliot’s complex love of women and its impact on his poetry. Beautifully written, fiercely honest, The Hyacinth Girl permanently dissolves the myth of impersonality, fathoming the vexed, tormented emotional life behind Eliot’s work."
Erica Wagner
"The true nature of T. S. Eliot’s love for his American muse, Emily Hale, has been nearly wholly hidden until now. In The Hyacinth Girl, Lyndall Gordon paints an astute portrait of Eliot as a man trapped between desire and propriety, between a past history of emotional damage and a seemingly impossible future of romantic contentment. Gordon illuminates Eliot’s writing through the prism of his correspondence with Hale, demonstrating how central she is to a real understanding of the man and his work. A revelatory book."
Spectator (UK) - Tom Williams
"Unrelenting focus on the women in the story…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."
Colm Tóibín (Best Books of the Year)
"The most brilliant and incisive new book on Eliot."
New York Times Book Review
In 2019, a cache of more than 1,000 letters from T. S. Eliot to his friend Emily Hale was finally unsealed, and Gordon was among the first to study them.”
