Mary and Mr Eliot
A Sort of Love Story
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- 13,99 €
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- 13,99 €
Descrizione dell’editore
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this illuminating volume, New Statesman contributor Wagner (Chief Engineer) collects the writings of Mary Trevelyan (1897–1983)—who is best remembered in her native England for her charitable work—on her friendship with poet T.S. Eliot. Wagner contextualizes the journal entries, correspondence, and remembrances that make up Trevelyan's unpublished manuscript, The Pope of Russell Square, which covers Trevelyan and Eliot's two-decade friendship that began when she invited him to read at a Student Christian Movement conference in 1936. "This is a portrait of a romance as much as it is an account of a friendship," Wagner writes, observing that Trevelyan had hoped her friendship with Eliot would become romantic until she was blindsided by his decision to elope with his secretary in 1957, after which Trevelyan and Eliot grew estranged. While Eliot scholars will be intrigued by Trevelyan's perspective on him, accounts of Trevelyan's leadership at the Student Movement House hostel for international students in London and involvement with the YMCA during WWII prove more captivating than her quotidian exchanges with the poet. Though readers may come for Eliot, it's Trevelyan who will win them over. Photos.
