The Silenced Muse: Emily Hale, T.S. Eliot, and the Role of a Lifetime

Retired journalist Fitzgerald (Conquering Heroines) offers a heartbreaking biography of Emily Hale (1891–1969), T.S. Eliot’s secret love. The pair met as teenagers in 1905 Boston, and though Hale spurned Eliot’s “awkward attempts at courtship,” they kept in touch after Eliot left to study at Oxford University. Eliot married Vivienne Haigh-Wood in 1915, but her mental and physical health problems strained their relationship. He reconnected with Hale during her 1929 visit to London, finding in her “a sympathetic listener” capable of providing the emotional support his wife no longer could. Though they only saw one another intermittently, Hale fell in love with Eliot and urged him to get a divorce, an idea he repeatedly batted down on religious grounds. After Haigh-Wood died in 1947, he refused to wed Hale for vague reasons (“I cannot, cannot, start life again,” he wrote at the time), only to marry his 30-year-old secretary, 38 years his junior, in 1957. Eliot comes across as by turns pitiful and detestable (he bitterly downplayed his feelings for Hale in a 1960 message he arranged to be released simultaneously with correspondence Hale had scheduled for publication 50 years after their deaths), and though Fitzgerald succeeds in reconstructing Hale’s career as an amateur actress and director, it’s the riveting, star-crossed love story that steals the show. This makes for a powerful complement to Anna Funder’s Wifedom. (Sept.)