The Hyacinth Girl
T.S. Eliot's Hidden Muse
Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, T.S. Eliot was considered the greatest English-language poet of his generation. His poems The Waste Land and Four Quartets are classics of the modernist canon, while 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. Like the authoritative yet restrained voice in his prose, he was the epitome of reserve. But there was another side to Eliot, as acclaimed biographer Lyndall Gordon reveals in her new biography, The Hyacinth Girl. While married twice, Eliot had an almost lifelong love for Emily Hale, an American drama teacher to whom he wrote extensive, illuminating,…
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November 21, 2023Lyndall Gordon is a British writer and academic popular for her literary biographies on notable persons such as Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, Charlotte Brontë, and T. S. Eliot. She received her undergraduate degree from the University of Cape Town and later went on to graduate with a doctorate from Columbia University in New York City. Her work has earned her many awards, including the British Academy’s Rose Mary Crawshay Prize, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and the Cheltenham Prize for Literature. Gordon is now a Senior Research Fellow at St. Hilda’s College, Oxford.