Mary and Mr Eliot

In 1938 T.S. Eliot struck up a friendship with Mary Trevelyan, a passionately curious woman and intrepid traveller. Their relationship was cosy and domestic - characterised by churchgoing, record-playing, day trips with Mary at the wheel or Eliot in his rolled shirt-sleeves cooking up sausages for dinner. Over the years, Mary came to believe that their friendship might lead to something more . . . but their journey together did not end as she would have hoped.

Trevelyan left a unique document - of diaries, letters and pictures - charting their twenty-year-long relationship in her vivid prose. Erica Wagner has brought this untold story together for the first time. Mary and Mr Eliot is a revelatory tale of joy, misunderstanding and betrayal that feels utterly modern and deeply human.

Auteur

Mary Trevelyan

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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 in his shirt-sleeves cooking up sausages for dinner. Over the years, their friendship deepened, and she came to believe it might lead to something more. Eliot led her to understand that any such commitment would be an impossibility for him. Then the revelation of his attachment to Emily Hale - and the shock of his marriage to his secretary Valerie Fletcher - caused a rupture between Trevelyan and the poet that could not be overcome.

Trevelyan left a unique document - of diaries, letters and pictures - charting their twenty-year-long relationship in her vivid prose. Erica Wagner has brought this untold story together for the first time. Mary and Mr Eliot is a revelatory tale of joy, misunderstanding and betrayal that feels utterly modern and deeply human.