The Hyacinth Girl: T.S. Eliot's Hidden Muse

"Superb... brims with insight into T.S. Eliot's complex love of women and its impact on his poetry. Beautifully written, fiercely honest, The Hyacinth Girl permanently dissolves the myth of impersonality, fathoming the vexed, tormented emotional life behind Eliot's work." —Jahan Ramazani, author of Poetry in a Global Age

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...