The silenced Muse
The first full-length biography of Emily Hale, T. S. Eliot's longtime secret love
In January 2020, the T. S. Eliot estate finally opened the largest and most eagerly awaited cache of new materials written by the Nobel-Prize-winning poet: the 1,131 letters he sent Emily Hale, his little-known American love. But even as Eliot scholars explore Hale’s impact on Eliot’s work, a tantalizing question has not been fully answered: who was Emily Hale?
Sara Fitzgerald’s The Silenced Muse: Emily Hale, T. S. Eliot, and the Role of a Lifetime is the first full-length biography devoted to Hale, telling her side of a complicated relationship. Based on the embargoed letters and Fitzgerald’s extensive research into Hale’s life and times, this book brings to light that Hale was much more than just a muse to a literary celebrity. Hale overcame personal hardship to pursue a career as a professor of speech and drama at prominent American women’s colleges and schools. She was a talented amateur actress and director, sharing the stage with others who went on to notable professional careers. Behind the scenes, she also guided Eliot as he began to explore playwriting with works such as Murder in the Cathedral.
Hale’s story is challenging to wholly uncover because the Boston clergyman’s daughter was by nature reticent and humble. More critically, Eliot arranged for nearly all of her letters to be destroyed. The Silenced Muse finally reveals that Hale’s story is not that of a lover scorned, but rather a woman who was herself gifted and celebrated by her students and peers.
praise for "the silenced muse"
"Hale as Her Own Woman"
“Although Eliot famously tried to erase his long attachment to his muse as “the love of a ghost for a ghost,” The Silenced Muse gives Emily Hale the substance she carried throughout her life. Fitzgerald’s meticulous research and abundant, accurate notes bring to light a full record of her performances on stage and her successes as a director of plays. The book's apt subtitle, The Role of a Lifetime, and the stress on drama shows Hale as her own woman with a fulfilling vocation for theatre and teaching. For Hale showed heartfelt generosity not only in private to a great poet, but to a myriad of obscure pupils whose latent gifts she elicited. The wealth of facts about this lively woman prompt further debate about the nature of the Eliot-Hale relationship.”
--Lyndall Gordon, author of The Hyacinth Girl: T. S. Eliot’s Hidden Muse
"Material Available in No Other Book "
“Drawing extensively on T. S. Eliot’s private correspondence and on newspaper archives on three continents, Sara Fitzgerald presents the first biography devoted exclusively to Emily Hale, the American actress and teacher who was throughout four decades the love of the poet’s life. The Silenced Muse tells Hale’s story with single-minded dedication and contains material available in no other book.”
--Robert Crawford, author of Eliot After “The Waste Land” and Young Eliot
A "Fascinating Work of Nonfiction"
"Missing letters, a secret love affair, a famous poet, a beautiful actress—what else could you possibly want in a story? . . . [A] fascinating work of nonfiction. . . . Fitzgerald, who is also the author of a novel based on this story (“The Poet’s Girl”), has restored Hale to the public eye by writing a meticulously researched book that reads like a novel. . . . Fitzgerald is a trustworthy narrator. She does a heroic job of piecing together Hale’s reactions based on letters Hale wrote to other people and from Eliot’s letters themselves, but she never oversteps, never allows us to be certain, and strangely, there is something satisfying about this.”
--Charlotte Gordon, The Washington Post
"Heartbreaking . . . Riveting"
“Retired journalist Fitzgerald (Conquering Heroines) offers a heartbreaking biography of Emily Hale (1891–1969), T.S. Eliot’s secret love. The pair met as teenagers in 1905 Boston, and though Hale spurned Eliot’s “awkward attempts at courtship,” they kept in touch after Eliot left to study at Oxford University. Eliot married Vivienne Haigh-Wood in 1915, but her mental and physical health problems strained their relationship. He reconnected with Hale during her 1929 visit to London, finding in her “a sympathetic listener” capable of providing the emotional support his wife no longer could. Though they only saw one another intermittently, Hale fell in love with Eliot and urged him to get a divorce, an idea he repeatedly batted down on religious grounds. After Haigh-Wood died in 1947, he refused to wed Hale for vague reasons (“I cannot, cannot, start life again,” he wrote at the time), only to marry his 30-year-old secretary, 38 years his junior, in 1957. Eliot comes across as by turns pitiful and detestable (he bitterly downplayed his feelings for Hale in a 1960 message he arranged to be released simultaneously with correspondence Hale had scheduled for publication 50 years after their deaths), and though Fitzgerald succeeds in reconstructing Hale’s career as an amateur actress and director, it’s the riveting, star-crossed love story that steals the show. This makes for a powerful complement to Anna Funder’s Wifedom.”
--Publisher's Weekly, August 13, 2024
"Emily Hale in Her Own Right at Last. . . "
"Emily Hale in her own right at last, emerging from behind the mirrors of Eliot-focused scholarship and the poet’s own letters, in this thoroughly researched biography.”
--Paul Keers, Chair of the T. S. Eliot Society (UK)
"Meticulous Research "
". . . what is clear through the meticulous research of selected letters, narrative writings and Eliot’s poetry is the love that Hale and Eliot had for each other. . . We will never have the insight which might have been afforded by T S Eliot’s letters, but Sara Fitzgerald has made imperfect knowledge transmit a clearer, less dark, impression of just how incredible and enduring Hale’s love was for Eliot, as, in some respects, his was for her. Perhaps.
--Christina Percy, for Exchanges,
the newsletter of the T. S. Eliot Society (U.K.)
"A Moving Account of Hale's Life "
T. S. Eliot’s letters to Emily Hale “are the agon of Sara Fitzgerald’s excruciating biography, as Hale and Eliot go back and forth over just how they can be together. . . . Because Eliot destroyed Hale’s letters, Ms. Fitzgerald is sometimes at a loss as to exactly what Emily Hale felt about a man who had assured her of so much and then delivered so little — never entirely dashing her hopes until, late in life, he married his secretary without so much as telling Hale until after the wedding . . . . Ms. Fitzgerald’s biography, whatever the gaps in the evidence, is nonetheless a moving account of Hale’s life, filled with the satisfactions of teaching generations of drama and speech students as well as her excellent performances in several successful theater productions, even though she never pursued a professional career. . . . [In addition,] Ms. Fitzgerald is scrupulous about not using loaded language when reporting on Eliot’s duplicity.
--Carl Rollyson, New York Sun
"Impeccably Researched and Dramatically Written"
“Sara Fitzgerald’s The Silenced Muse gives voice to the complex push and pull in T.S. Eliot and Emily Hale’s on-again, off-again relationship. Impeccably researched and dramatically written, Fitzgerald’s book illuminates the life of a woman whom history – and archival strictures - have kept in the shadows. Fortunately for us, Fitzgerald has changed this.”
--Julie Dobrow, author of After Emily: Two Remarkable Women
and the Legacy of America’s Greatest Poet
"A Satisfying Story. . . That Readers Won't Soon Forget"
“Actor and educator Emily Hale takes her rightful place center stage in this sensitive biography of the woman who served as the poet T.S. Eliot's muse. Sara Fitzgerald’s deep research reveals Hale’s intelligence, independent spirit, and great capacity for love and loyalty, and she renders Hale’s successes and heartbreaks with visceral clarity. It’s a satisfying story of a complex woman that readers won’t soon forget.”
--Theresa Kaminski, author of Queen of the West:
The Life and Times of Dale Evans
"The Definitive Biography of Hale"
"Captivated by the relationship between T.S. Eliot and his long-lost American love Emily Hale, author Sara Fitzgerald initially wrote a well-reviewed novel about the romance. Now she has written the definitive biography of Hale, an actress and educator. It is well-researched and riveting."
--Meryl Gordon, New York Times best-selling author of
The Woman Who Knew Everyone: The Power of Perle Mesta,
Washington's Most Favorite Hostess
"Sizzles with the Tension of Love's Complications"
“The Silenced Muse sizzles with the tension of love’s complications. That the emotionally tumultuous relationship involves the celebrated poet T.S. Eliot and his lifelong friend and confidante Emily Hale makes this compelling book a must-read. Fired by a reporter’s zeal to uncover the full story, Sara Fitzgerald has given us the first-ever biography of the long-obscure woman who inspired some of Eliot’s most memorable writings, only to discover he wasn’t always a man of his words.”
--Diana Parsell, author of Eliza Scidmore:
The Trailblazing Journalist Behind Washington’s Cherry Trees
news about "The Silenced Muse"
Emily's World
In the course of researching the life of Emily Hale, Sara Fitzgerald visited many places where Emily Hale lived and worked. Here are some of them.