Emily Hale

Emily Hale (27 October 1891 – 12 October 1969),[3] was an American speech and drama teacher, who was the longtime muse and confidante of the poet T. S. Eliot. Exactly 1,131 letters from Eliot to Hale were deposited in Princeton University Library in 1956 and were described as one of the best-known sealed archives in the world for many years.[4][5] Per Hale's instructions, the letters were opened in January 2020, 50 years after Hale's death. The same day, Harvard’s Houghton Library issued an unexpected statement that Eliot had prepared in 1960, to be opened when Hale's archives were released.[6] Princeton then released Hale's summary of their relationship.[7]

Emily Hale
Emily Hale in 1956, when she taught speech and drama at Abbot Academy, now merged with a Phillips Andover Academy[1]
Born(1891-10-27)27 October 1891
East Orange, New Jersey, U.S.
Died12 October 1969(1969-10-12) (aged 77)
Concord, Massachusetts, U.S.[2]
NationalityAmerican
OccupationSpeech and drama teacher
Known forMuse of T.S. Eliot

Early life and career

Hale was born in East Orange, New Jersey, on 27 October 1891.[3][8][9] Her father was the Reverend Edward Hale, an architect who became a Unitarian Minister and taught at Harvard Divinity School.[8] Her mother Emily (née Milliken) had become a "permanent mental invalid" after the death of her infant son,[10] and Hale was brought up by her aunt Edith Perkins and her uncle, the Unitarian Minister Reverend John Carroll Perkins.[11][12] The couple lived in Boston but spent their summers from 1930 to 1939 in Chipping Campden, England, with Hale also attending.[10][13][14]

She graduated from Miss Porter's School,[3] and she was a speech and drama teacher at various women's colleges from 1916 onwards, including Simmons University (then College) (1916–1921), Milwaukee-Downer College (1921–1928) (now part of Lawrence University), Scripps College (1932–1934),[8][5] and Smith College (1936–1942), as well as the all-girls Concord Academy and Abbot Academy preparatory schools at the end of her teaching career.[1][3][5][8]

Hale was an active member of the Unitarian Church and also the League of Women Voters, and she was a volunteer on the Sophia Smith Collection.[3]

Relationship with Eliot

Hale met with Eliot in 1912 when he was a graduate student studying philosophy at Harvard,[15] and Eliot declared his love for her shortly before leaving for Europe in 1914;[16] biographers have recorded that Eliot left that meeting with the impression that Hale did have similar feelings.[13][17] However, in June 1915, Eliot married Vivienne Haigh-Wood, and his correspondence with Hale did not materially resume until 1927.[13] From 1930 until 1956, Eliot wrote over a thousand letters to Hale.[18] Eliot visited Hale in California over the New Year's holidays in 1932-33, then decided to seek a formal separation from his wife when he returned to England in 1933.[13] Eliot told Hale he could not seek a divorce because of the strictures of his Anglican faith.[6]

Hale and Eliot spent the summers from 1935 to 1939 together in Campden, Gloucestershire, as the guests of her aunt and uncle, the Perkinses.[19][14][13] In 1934, Hale and Eliot visited Burnt Norton, an abandoned manor house in Gloucestershire.[13] This visit provided the inspiration for much of Eliot's 1935 poem Burnt Norton,[20] in which scholars have surmised that the "you" in the poem was Hale, and their relationship was the "we."[13] While Hale never openly regarded herself as Eliot's muse, it is known she identified herself in various other Eliot poems, when teaching her students at various colleges.[13] In a memoir released by Princeton Library in mid-January 2020, Hale said that Eliot had told her that "Burnt Norton" was his love poem to her.[21]

World War II intervened, and Hale and Eliot would not meet again until 1946, by which time Eliot was 58 and Hale was 55;[13] however, after the death of Vivienne in 1947, Eliot arranged a meeting with Hale at which he told her he no longer could marry her. Hale had anticipated that they would live together when Vivienne died and was shocked and saddened when she learned Eliot had decided not to marry her.[19] After 1947, Hale and Eliot would only meet fleetingly, but would still correspond, although at a reduced frequency.[13]

Eliot's relationship with Hale was said by some biographers to provide Eliot with a model of a silent, ethereal woman and chaste love that could be indefinitely sustained.[5] Hale's own feelings for Eliot are largely unknown, partly because Eliot burned all of her letters after he married his much younger secretary Esmé Valerie Fletcher, in 1957.[13] Eliot's last letter to Hale was in 1956.[22]

Life after Eliot

In 1957, recently retired from the Abbot Academy,[23] Hale was admitted to Massachusetts General Hospital for a "breakdown".[13] One of Hale's biographers, Sara Fitzgerald, said "Emily Hale is painted as someone who fell apart, who had a nervous breakdown after loving Eliot for so many years and seeing him marry another woman", and "I didn’t necessarily find that to be the case. I felt she got over this blow and kept living".[23] After her retirement from the Abbot Academy, Hale acted in a number of well-received plays, and kept in contact with her friends and past students.[23] She also taught for a period at Oak Grove School in Vassalboro, Maine, and finally died in Concord, Massachusetts.[2]

Fitzgerald records that Hale wrote a final letter to Eliot in the early 1960s, in which she told him it was "'difficult' for her to consider her life to be important just because they had been connected," though the letter "ended on an upbeat note, hoping that they could still be friends."[23] Eliot never responded, and he died soon after in 1965.[23][21]

Letter archive

Hale was a friend of the Princeton University English professor, Willard Thorp, and his wife Margaret Farrand Thorp.[5] From 1942, she explored with Thorp the idea of keeping Eliot's letters in the Princeton University Library for safekeeping, finally deciding to do this in July 1956.[5] Hale specified that the letters should be kept closed for fifty full years after the latter of her or Eliot's death. Hale died after Eliot, on 12 October 1969 in Concord,[3] and therefore, the archive was only opened to scholars in January 2020, revealing 1,131 letters from Eliot to Hale dating from the period 1930 to 1956.[22][5][24] The letters included information about the evolving relationship between Hale and Eliot, and in some cases contradicted established published sources.[21]

The letters can only be read in person at the library; a compilation of the letters is now being prepared, and its editor, John Haffenden, has said he anticipates it will be published in 2021.[25] Eliot's copyright still applies to the letters.[17]

The number of letters, by year, are as follows:[22]

  • 1930 (7 letters)
  • 1931 (92)
  • 1932 (100)
  • 1933 (64)
  • 1934 (64)
  • 1935 (91)
  • 1936 (76)
  • 1937 (63)
  • 1938 (59)
  • 1939 (78)
  • 1940 (53)
  • 1941 (35)
  • 1942 (35)
  • 1943 (37)
  • 1944 (40)
  • 1945 (30)
  • 1946 (27)
  • 1947 (34)
  • 1948 (25)
  • 1949 (15)
  • 1950 (17)
  • 1951 (20)
  • 1952 (15)
  • 1953 (12)
  • 1954 (14)
  • 1955 (14)
  • 1956 (14)

Hale included a cover note with the letters saying, "The memory of the years when we were most together and so happy are mine always", and also, "I accepted conditions as they were offered under the unnatural code which surrounded us, so that perhaps more sophisticated persons than I will not be surprised to learn the truth about us".[26]

Posthumous statement

In a surprise to scholars, Eliot's estate simultaneously issued a written statement by him to be opened on the release of Hale's letters. Eliot's statement said that he "never had any sexual relations with Emily Hale", and it appeared to reject the notion that Hale was his muse: "Emily Hale would have killed the poet in me; Vivienne nearly was the death of me, but she kept the poet alive".[6][15]

However, some commentators immediately contrasted Eliot's statement with some of the early releases of his letters which state, "You have made me perfectly happy: that is, happier than I have ever been in my life", and they speculated that Eliot's harsh statement might have been a reaction to his unhappiness with Hale's decision to archive his letters for future release.[27][4][17] After an initial review of the letters, Eliot scholar Frances Dickey told the Washington Post that "he basically confesses his love for Emily Hale and tells her that she's the great love of his life", and "that he's been writing for her all of these years, and he even names the places in his poetry where he has paid tribute to her or honored her in some way".[28][6] Eliot biographer Lyndall Gordon told PBS News that the contents of the letters far exceeded Dickey and Gordon's expectations. "Eliot was very emotional and very explicit about how much he loved her and how important she was to his work".[4] Gordon also added, "Eliot lays it all bare. That’s striking, in part, because for a long time, it was 'unfashionable' to think of Eliot as a confessional poet".[4] He highlighted passages of works that Eliot told Hale she had inspired, including The Waste Land.[4]

See also

References
  1. "Emily Hale". Digitalcommonwealth.org. Retrieved 6 January 2020.
  2. Sahin, Zach (15 April 2020). "'A Strange Story': The Love Song of T. Stearns Eliot". The Daily Princetonian. Retrieved 21 April 2020.
  3. Identifier: CA-MS-00344. "Emily Hale Papers". Smith College. Retrieved 10 January 2020.
  4. Barajas, Joshua (8 January 2020). "Why scholars think the unsealed T.S. Eliot letters are a big deal". PBS News. Retrieved 9 January 2020. Decades ago, biographer Lyndall Gordon made a vow: She would live to see the day a certain trove of T.S. Eliot’s correspondence was unveiled.
  5. Skemer, Don (16 May 2017). "Sealed Treasure: T. S. Eliot Letters to Emily Hale". Princeton University Library (PUL) Manuscripts News. Retrieved 6 January 2020.
  6. Brockell, Gilliam (3 January 2020). "T.S. Eliot defends himself from the grave after love letters are released, insisting 'I never at any time had sexual relations with Miss Hale'". Washington Post. Retrieved 7 January 2020.
  7. https://blogs.princeton.edu/manuscripts/2020/01/21/face-to-face-emily-hale-on-her-letters-from-t-s-eliot/
  8. Haffenden, John; Eliot, Valerie (August 2016). The Letters of T. S. Eliot: Volume 6: 1932-1933 1st Edition. Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0300211801. Retrieved 17 April 2020. Biographical Register: Emily Hale (1891–1969)
  9. Gordon, Lyndall (1985). "T. S. Eliot". The Craft of Literary Biography. Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 173–185. doi:10.1007/978-1-349-07452-5_11. ISBN 978-1-349-07454-9.
  10. Mcintire, Gabrielle (September 2015). The Cambridge Companion to The Waste Land. Cambridge University Press. p. 44. ISBN 978-1107672574.
  11. Pearson, Graham (2018). "Mrs. Edith Carroll Perkins and Chipping Campden Gardens". Signpost: The Journal of Chipping Campden History Society. 8: 12–15.
  12. Eliot, T. S. (15 January 2019). Eliot, Valerie; Haffenden, John (eds.). Letters of T. S. Eliot Volume 8: 1936–1938. Faber & Faber. ISBN 978-0-571-31639-7.
  13. Steven Carroll (1 September 2017). "The secret heartache that inspired TS Eliot, the so-called 'impersonal' poet". Sydney Morning Herald. Retrieved 8 January 2020.
  14. "Murder in the Cathedral by Eliot, T. S. (1888-1965): Faber and Faber, London Signed by Author(s) – Riverrun Books & Manuscripts". Abebooks.co.uk. Retrieved 6 January 2020.
  15. Cramer, Maria (4 January 2020). "The Love Letters of T.S. Eliot: New Clues Into His Most Mysterious Relationship". New York Times. Retrieved 6 January 2020.
  16. "Statement by T. S. Eliot on the opening of the Emily Hale letters at Princeton". T. S. Eliot Foundation. Retrieved 6 January 2020.
  17. Dico, Joy Lo (10 January 2020). "How TS Eliot's letters came back to haunt him". Financial Times. Retrieved 17 April 2020.
  18. Kim, Violet (3 January 2020). "T.S. Eliot Left a Deliciously Petty Note to Future Readers of His Private Letters". Slate. Retrieved 6 January 2020.
  19. Helmore, Edward (2 January 2020). "TS Eliot's hidden love letters reveal intense, heartbreaking affair". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 6 January 2020.
  20. Surette, Leon (2008). The modern dilemma : Wallace Stevens, T.S. Eliot and humanism. Montréal [Québec]: McGill-Queen's University Press. ISBN 978-0-7735-7505-9. OCLC 647844423.
  21. Fitzgerald, Sara (2020). The Poet's Girl: A Novel of Emily Hale and T. S. Eliot. ISBN 978-1949759181. Retrieved 21 April 2020.
  22. "Special Collections: T. S. Eliot Letters to Emily Hale". Princeton University Library. Retrieved 8 January 2019. The collection consists of approximately 1,131 letters and related enclosures by Eliot to Emily Hale (1891-1969), a teacher, actress, and secret muse to Eliot. The letters span the years from 1930 to 1956
  23. Fiermonti, Katie (23 October 2018). "A secret life in letters". Andover.edu. Retrieved 21 April 2020.
  24. Pavia, Will (6 January 2020). "T S Eliot's row with muse Emily Hale revealed". The Times. Retrieved 6 January 2020.
  25. FM, Player. "The Book Club: What Do T.S. Eliot's Letters Reveal? Spectator Radio podcast". Player.fm. Retrieved 23 January 2020.
  26. Parket, James (6 April 2020). "The Secret Cruelty of T. S. Eliot". The Atlantic. Retrieved 21 April 2020.
  27. Zakaria, Rafia (7 January 2020). "May T.S. Eliot letters send an overdue #MeToo message". CNN News. Retrieved 7 January 2020.
  28. Katz, Brigit (6 January 2020). "Emily Hale Was T.S. Eliot's Confidante—and More, Suggest Newly Unsealed Letters". Smithsonian (magazine). Retrieved 7 January 2020.

Further reading
  • Fitzgerald, Sara (2020). The Poet's Girl: A Novel of Emily Hale and T. S. Eliot. ISBN 978-1949759181.
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