Winner of Nobel Prize in Literature, T.S. Eliot one of the greatest  English-language poets of his generation, protected his privacy while publicly associated with three women: two wives, and a church-going companion. This presentation concealed a life-long love for an American 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,  she is the Hyacinth Girl. His other classic poem is Four Quartets and his essays influenced a school of literary criticism. Raised in St. Louis, shaped by his youth in Boston, he reinvented himself as an Englishman after converting to the Anglican Church, he was the epitome of reserve. Gordon explains Eliot’s relationships, were inextricable from his poetry.

Leading biographer, Lyndall Gordon, drawing on the dramatic new material of the only recently unsealed 1,131 letters  released by Princeton University’s Firestone Library only in 2020, Eliot wrote to Emily Hale,  who now becomes the first and consistently important women of life and his art, reveals a hidden Eliot. Vivienne, the flamboyant wife with whom he shared a private wasteland, Mary Trevelyan, his companion in prayer,  a wartime woman of action, and Valerie Fletcher, the young disciple to whom he proposed when his relationship with Emily foundered. Eliot kept his women apart as each ignited his transformation. As poet, expatriate, convert, and finally in his latter years, a man “ made for love’.

Emily Hale was the centre of a love drama he conceived and the inspiration for the lines he wrote to last beyond their time. To read Eliot’s twice-weekly letters to Emily during the thirties and forties is to enter the heart of the poet’s art.

Gordon’s stunning portrait of Eliot will compel not only a reassessment of the man- judgmental, duplicitous, intensely conflicted indubitably brilliant. Emily Hale was his “Hyacinth Girl”.

The Hyacinth Girl. T.S. Eliot’s hidden muse by Lyndall Gordon, Virago £25, 525 pages.