Painted Shadow: The Life of Vivienne Eliot
Books / Hardcover
Books › Biography & Autobiography › Literary
ISBN: 0385499922 / Publisher: Doubleday, April 2002
The first biography of Vivienne Eliot, the first wife of poet T. S. Eliot, offers a remarkable portrait of a neurotic, lonely, and distraught woman who was abandoned by her husband and confined to a mental asylum but whose tormented marriage became the source and subject of some of Eliot's most acclaimed works, including The Waste Land.
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By the time she was committed to an asylum in 1938, five years after T. S. Eliot deserted her, Vivienne Eliot was a lonely, distraught figure. 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 had become: a phantomlike shape on the fringe of Eliot's life, written out of his biography and literary history.This portrait of Vivienne Eliot, first wife of poet T. S. Eliot, gives a voice to the woman who, for seventeen years, had shared a unique literary partnership with Eliot but who was scapegoated for the failure of the marriage and all but obliterated from historical record.
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