Mary and Mr Eliot: A Sort of Love Story

Description

He was one of the most eminent literary figures in the world. She was the kind of pioneering woman who knew she could make the world a better place; someone who was utterly fearless and straight-talking, even around Nobel Prize-winning poets. In 1938, as T.S. Eliot was establishing himself as 'a Classic in his lifetime', he struck up a friendship with Mary Trevelyan. This passionately curious woman - an intrepid traveller - was Warden of the Student Movement House, mere yards from the poet and editor's office at Faber & Faber in Bloomsbury. Their relationship was domestic rather than artistic, characterised by churchgoing, conversation, record-playing, daytrips with Mary at the wheel, Eliot is his shirt-sleeves cooking up sausages for dinner. Over the years, their friendship deepened in intimacy and ambiguity. She wished for more than those glasses of gin, the cheerful chats. And she came to believe it might lead to something more - so much so that she proposed marriage twice. Eliot led her to understand that any such commitment would be an impossibility for him - hence Mary's shock when his marriage to Valerie Fletcher, his secretary nearly forty years his junior, was announced, and his ongoing attachment to Emily Hale, his youthful love, revealed. Trevelyan left a unique document - of diaries, letters and pictures - charting their twenty year long relationship. Erica Wagner has brought this untold story together for the first time. Mary and Mr Eliot is a revelatory portrait of Eliot. It also introduces us to a fearless and energetic woman sidelined by history, whose experience of unrequited love - joy, misunderstanding, betrayal - feels utterly modern, and deeply human.

Mary Trevelyan (1881-1966) was heavily involved in charitable works and an influential commentator on British culture and society, perhaps best known for single-mindedly bringing about the establishment of International Students House in Regent's Park, London, the charity for which she was Warden for much of her working life. From 1938 to 1957 she was a close friend and companion of T.S. Eliot, a period which she wrote of in the form of an unpublished manuscript titled The Pope of Russell Square. Erica Wagner is an American author and critic. Her books include Gravity: Stories, Ariel's Gift: Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and the Story of Birthday Letters and Chief Engineer: The Man Who Built the Brooklyn Bridge. Previously the literary editor of The Times, she has interviewed the likes of Philip Roth, Seamus Heaney, Doris Lessing, Donna Tart, and Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie. Wagner also reviews regularly for the New York Times and was selected for the judging panel of the Booker prize in 2002 and 2014. She is a Lecturer in Creative Writing at Goldsmiths College. She lives in London.