Painted Shadow: A Life of Vivienne Eliot - Hardcover

'It was only when I saw Vivie in the asylum for the last time I realised I had done something very wrong.... She was as sane as I was... What Tom and I did was wrong. And Mother. I did everything Tom told me to. Not ashamed to say so. But when it came to our family, I think he bit off more than he could chew. He didn't understand the rules, actually. You see - you have to be kind to Vivie.'
Maurice Haigh-Wood, Vivienne Eliot's brother

By the time she was committed to an asylum in 1938, five years after T.S. Eliot deserted her, Vivienne Eliot was a lonely, occasionally demented figure. She wandered London's streets, often arriving at Faber & Faber, her husband's offices, to leave desperate messages appealing for contact. Shunned by literary London she was the neurotic wife whom Eliot had left behind. In The Family Reunion he described a wife who was a 'restless shivering painted shadow' and so she has become: a phantom-like figure on the fringe of Eliot's life, written out of his biography and literary history.
This outstanding biography is the first life of Vivienne Eliot. It places her firmly at the centre of T.S. Eliot's life for almost two decades and is the first full-length portrait of his marriage and its influence on his emotional life and work. Based on papers both privately owned and in university library archives, and drawing, most importantly, on Vivienne Eliot's own writings held in Bodleian Library, Oxford, the author uses many hitherto unpublished sources to draw a strikingly new picture of Eliot's first wife.

When Tom and Vivienne married on 28 June 1915 they had known each other only a few months. She was unintellectual and gregarious, recovering from a failed love affair and eager to escape a domineering mother. T.S. Eliot was still grieving the death at the Dardanelles of Jean Verdenal, the young Frenchman he had loved, and to whose memory he was to dedicate The Waste Land. Within weeks he had introduced Vivienne to his mentor, the predatory and exploitative Bertrand Russell who under the guise of taking the Eliots under his wing drew Vivienne into an ever-closer relationship.

As the author of Prufrock's reputation grew, the Eliots were increasingly involved in the emotional merry-go-round of the Bloomsbury and Garsington circles and their marriage became the subject of speculation. Vivienne, though collaborating with her husband in writing for his journal, The Criterion, floundered in her attempts to keep up with the different sets and intrigues, seeming unable to impress Tom's friends.
The sadness of the Eliots' marriage lay in the pairing of a reserved, and intensely serious man, with an extrovert woman who longed both for a full sexual relationship with her husband and to be allowed to continue helping with his work. As her desperation increased she became ever more addicted to prescription drugs and her bouts of nervous depression grew worse.

Out of this emotional turbulence came the most important English poem of the twentieth century: The Waste Land. Carole Seymour-Jones shows convincingly that it cannot be understood without reference to his troubled marriage, and her book opens the way to a new understanding of Eliot's poetry. At the same time she shows, for the first time from Vivienne's point of view, how a spontaneous, loving but fragile woman was trapped and ultimately destroyed by a disastrous marriage.

Carole Seymour-Jones is the author of the biography Beatrice and Sydney Webb. She received a Visiting Fellowship from the Paul Mellon Foundation for her work on the archives held at the Harry Ransom Research Centre, University of Texas.

Carole Seymour-Jones is the author of the biography, Beatrice and Sydney Webb, and has spent the last five years researching this life of Vivienne Eliot. She received a Visiting Fellowship from the Paul Mellon Foundation for her work on the archives held at the Harry Ransom Research Center, University of Texas, Austin.