Mrs. T. S. Eliot I

„For my dearest Vivienne, this book, which no one else will quite understand.“ Thus Eliot inscribed a copy of his Poems, 1909–1925 . One of his biographers asserts that

without knowledge of Eliot’s first, tragic marriage, a complete appreciation of his poems is impossible. No matter what Flaubert, Valéry, and Eliot may have said about the objective impersonality of art, the full heartrending meaning of The Waste Land and „Ash-Wednesday“ depends on it. / New York Review of Books 23.5.02 (sic)

Painted Shadow: The Life of Vivienne Eliot, First Wife of T.S. Eliot, and the Long-Suppressed Truth About Her Influence on His Genius
by Carole Seymour-Jones
Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 698 pp., $35.00