Last week Lyndall Gordon’s THE HYACINTH GIRL: T.S. Eliot’s Hidden Muse was published by Virago in the UK in a beautiful hardback edition. Norton will publish in the US in November 2022. Colm Tóibín has hailed it as ‘brilliant … a rare work of sympathy and insight’ and Pulitzer finalist and Sylvia Plath biographer Heather Clark called it a ‘brilliant and revelatory work from one of our greatest biographers’, adding that ‘there is no finer guide into the mind of T.S. Eliot than Lyndall Gordon.’
This week Lyndall Gordon also appears in a new documentary about Eliot’s The Waste Land, which forms part of programming across BBC television and radio designed to celebrate the centenary of the publication of Eliot’s great long poem, The Waste Land. Directed by Susanna White, ‘T.S. Eliot – Into The Waste Land’, uncovers for the first time the hidden personal story behind Eliot’s creation of his celebrated poem. The documentary airs on BBC2 on Thursday 13th October at 9pm and is an Oxford Films production for the BBC, commissioned by BBC Arts Editor Mark Bell and produced by Rosie Alison and executive producer Nick Kent. You can watch the documentary here: www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001d1yy/ts-eliot-into-the-waste-land
Along with Lyndall’s illuminating insights, there are contributions from actor and director Fiona Shaw and composer Max Richter; poets Hannah Sullivan and Daljit Nagra; Vivien Eliot's biographer Ann Pasternak Slater and Faber Poetry Editor Matthew Hollis, among others. Simon Russell Beale performs specially recorded readings of the poem, in conjunction with Eliot's own reading of his work. Moving through all five sections of the poem, the documentary explores many different facets of The Waste Land, from Eliot's state of mind during each phase, to the different places where it was composed.
Jahan Ramazani, author of POETRY IN A GOLDEN AGE wrote this of Lyndall’s work: ‘Beautifully written, fiercely honest, THE HYACINTH GIRL permanently dissolves the myth of impersonality, fathoming the vexed, tormented emotional life behind Eliot’s work.’
Among the greatest of poets, T. S. Eliot protected his privacy while publicly associated with three women: two wives and a church-going companion. At the same time he concealed a life-long love for a fourth woman, Emily Hale, a drama teacher to whom he wrote (and later suppressed) over a thousand letters. Hale was the source of ‘memory and desire’ in The Waste Land – as Lyndall writes, she is ‘the Hyacinth Girl’, in the memorable phrase from Eliot’s work.
Drawing on the dramatic new material of the recently unsealed 1,131 letters Eliot wrote to Hale, Lyndall Gordon reveals a hidden Eliot. In The Telegraph, Frances Wilson speaks of Lyndall Gordon’s ‘subtle readings’ and ‘customary care and delicacy’ in sifting through the documents and ‘tracing Hale’s influence throughout Eliot’s poetry’. In THE HYACINTH GIRL, Emily Hale is shown to be a quiet yet vital force, a consistently important woman in Eliot’s life – and his art. Gordon also offers new insight into the other spirited women who shaped him: Vivienne, the flamboyant wife with whom he shared a private wasteland; Mary Trevelyan, his companion in prayer; and Valerie Fletcher, the young disciple to whom he proposed when his relationship with Emily foundered, and with whom he lived happily till his death. Eliot kept these women in his life very separate, as each ignited his transformations as poet, expatriate, convert, and, finally, in his latter years, a man `made for love’.
Listen to Lyndall Gordon talking about The Waste Land on Woman’s Hour (at 46 minutes) in September, and Susanna White talking about the BBC documentary on the Today programme (at 2 hours 55 minutes).
Further Praise for THE HYACINTH GIRL
‘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.’ – Erica Wagner, author MARY AND MR ELIOT
'An illuminating account' – Publishers Weekly
‘There is no finer guide into the mind of T.S. Eliot than Lyndall Gordon... Thanks to Gordon’s meticulous research and inspired storytelling, we will never read these poems the same way again… Emily Hale, too, finally gets her due in this brilliant and revelatory work from one of our greatest biographers.’ – Heather Clark, author of the Pulitzer Prize finalist RED COMET: THE SHORT LIFE AND BLAZING ART OF SYLVIA PLATH
‘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.’ – Colm Tóibín, author of THE MAGICIAN
‘Gordon sifts through the remaining documents with her customary care and delicacy … tracing Hale’s influence throughout the poetry, aware that her interpretations of character are based on one side of a correspondence… Gordon’s subtle readings never lose sight of the central mystery: why did Hale stay in a relationship that offered no future? The answer is that the letters had become her life, and it was as evidence of that that she chose to save them.’ – Frances Wilson, The Telegraph
‘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 THE HYACINTH GIRL … Gordon, 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.’ – Tom Williams, The Spectator
‘An indispensable study that will inspire new perspectives on Eliot’s life and work for generations to come.’ – Anita Patterson, Professor of English, Boston University
‘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… 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.’ – Michael North, Professor of English, University of California, and editor of the NORTON CRITICAL EDITION OF THE WASTE LAND AND OTHER POEMS
‘Like an unopened Egyptian tomb, a trove of TS Eliot’s letters has lurked for decades in the 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.’ – Benjamin Moser, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of SONTAG: HER LIFE AND WORK
‘In an engrossing study of art refracting life, Lyndall Gordon explores the conflicted emotions that Eliot translated into his ostensibly impersonal art.’ – Leo Damrosch, author of ADVENTURER: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF GIACOMO CASANOVA
About Lyndall Gordon
A much-celebrated biographer, Lyndall Gordon lives in Oxford. Her ability to make the subjects of her biographies come vividly to life has won her many literary awards, including the Cheltenham Prize and the James Tait Black prize. She has also been longlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize and shortlisted for the Duff Cooper Prize and the Comisso Prize in Italy for her Emily Dickinson biography LIVE LIKE LOADED GUNS.
Her previous biographical work on T.S. Eliot – two biographies, ELIOT’S EARLY YEARS and ELIOT’S NEW LIFE, incorporated into an updated edition, THE IMPERFECT LIFE OF T.S. ELIOT – won the British Academy's Rose Mary Crawshay Prize and Southern Arts prize. THE IMPERFECT LIFE OF T.S Eliot was also selected by the New York Public Library as one of 25 'Books to Remember' from 2000 and by the Independent on Sunday as one of the '30 best biographies of the twentieth century'. Translator Xu Xiaofan won the Lu Xun Literary Prize for her translation of THE IMPERFECT LIFE OF T.S. ELIOT, published in China by Shanghai Literature and Art.
Candia McWilliam calls Lyndall Gordon 'a rare phenomenon: a biographer whose preoccupations and authorial career reveal a flowering towards imaginative truth.' Brenda Maddox talks of her 'adventurous scholarship'.