Painted Shadow: The Life of Vivienne Eliot, First Wife of T. S. Eliot

By Carole Seymour-Jones

Book Overview

By the time Vivienne Eliot was committed to an asylum for what would be the final nine years of her life, she had been abandoned by her husband T.S. Eliot and shunned by literary London. Yet Vivienne was neither insane nor insignificant. She generously collaborated in her husband's literary efforts, taking dictation, editing his drafts, and writing articles for his magazine, Criterion . Her distinctive voice can be heard in his poetry. And paradoxically, it was the unhappiness of the Eliots' marriage that inspired some of the poet's most distinguished work, from The Family Reunion to The Waste Land . This first biography ever written about Vivienne draws on hundreds of previously unpublished papers, journals and letters to portray a spontaneous, loving, but fragile woman who had an important influence on her husband's work, as well as a great poet whose behavior was hampered by psychological and sexual impulses he could not fully acknowledge. Intriguing and provocative, Painted Shadow gracefully rescues Vivienne Eliot from undeserved obscurity, and is indispensable for anyone wishing to understand T.S. Eliot, Vivienne, or the world in which they traveled.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0385499930
• ISBN13: 9780385499934
• Release Date: October 2003
• Publisher: Anchor Books
• Length: 736 Pages
• Weight: 1.52 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.4" x 5.2" x 8.1"

Customer Reviews

Absorbing and excellent

This is a superb study of the frustration that a bad marriage can wreak on two (mostly) admirable individuals: Vivienne Haig, sexually hungry and emotionally fragile, and Thomas Stearns Eliot, a homosexual who blithely imagined that marriage would cure him. The chafing these two endured makes for painful reading, though the author tells her story with such dispassion and aplomb that she mitigates their pain. Each marital partner damaged the other: for instance, whereas Vivienne openly slept with Bertrand Russell, Eliot openly sought "German Jack" as his lover. Everyone around them was disappointed and dismayed--increasingly so. Only when the two partners worked together on literary projects did their troubled marriage blossom. But when Eliot ran away from Vivienne in 1926 and then for years cruelly evaded her, she fell apart; and after she apparently threatened to expose his sexual preference, Eliot had her committed from 1938 till she died in 1947. This biography tells what the film TOM AND VIV omits: the sexual hostility that fueled their marriage. Highly recommended.