The Hyacinth Girl
- Author Lyndall Gordon
- Narrator Buffy Davis
- Publisher Little, Brown Book Group
- Run Time 18 hours and 30 minutes
- Format Audio
- Genre Biography and non-fiction prose, Biography: writers.
Titles Purchased
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- 6-10
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Price p/Title
- $13.95
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What to expect
Drawing on the only recently unsealed 1,131 letters Eliot wrote to Hale and suppressed in his lifetime, leading biographer Lyndall Gordon reveals both the hidden poet and the muse who was the first and consistently important woman of life and his art. Emily Hale was at the centre of a love drama he conceived and the inspiration for the lines he wrote to last beyond their time.
'Thanks to her meticulous research and inspired storytelling we will never read Eliot's poems the same way again' Heather Clark, author of Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath
'Exquisitely nuanced' Kathryn Hughes, Sunday Times
'Gordon is a writer of high intelligence and deep sensibility, with an earnest interest in truth and justice... coupled with a moral seriousness that is never solemn' Richard Davenport-Hines, Literary Review
'Revelatory' Erica Wagner
Critics Review
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Extraordinary… The Hyacinth Girl is a rare work of sympathy and insight. Lyndall Gordon’s passionately intelligent engagement with the letters between T. S. Eliot and Emily Hale is matched by her close reading of Eliot’s poems. Her ability to see both complexity and simplicity in the relationship between Eliot and Hale means that their entangled world comes fully alive in this brilliant book
Colm Tóibín -
Gordon sifts through the documents with her customary care and delicacy… [her] subtle readings never lose sight of the central mystery
Telegraph -
Explores some of the most significant relationships of Eliot’s life, and by shifting the focus to these women a less familiar Eliot emerges… in tracing Hale’s life to its end, [Gordon] reminds us that she lived her own life
Spectator -
T.S. Eliot’s oft-forgotten relationship with an American woman takes center stage in this illuminating account from Gordon … it also treats the women in his life with dignity and goes a long way in reversing the erasure he attempted. Literature lovers, take note
Publishers Weekly -
There is no finer guide into the mind of T. S. Eliot than Lyndall Gordon… Thanks to her meticulous research and inspired storytelling we will never read [Eliot’s] poems the same way again
Heather Clark, author of Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath -
Allows Gordon to find new coherence in Eliot’s otherwise apparently fragmented interior life… Equally praiseworthy are Gordon’s sensitive assessments of the other women who shaped Eliot’s life
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