Vivienne haigh wood biography

  • T.s. eliot children
  • Valerie eliot
  • T s eliot second wife

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    Driven to distraction — the unhappy life of Vivien Eliot

    Do you think your mother slept with T.S. Eliot? That was the question inom needed to ask the year-old in front of me. It wasn’t easy. I’d never met him before. After some preliminary chat, though, I realised this affable man knew exactly where our conversation was heading and had pondered the question a good deal himself.

    The barrister Jeremy Hutchinson — Baron Hutchinson of Lullington — was the son of Mary Hutchinson, Eliot’s close friend. Infatuated with the poet for a time, she had met ‘Tom’ and his wife Vivien before Vivien’s adultery with Bertrand Russell, and some years before the publication of The Waste Land in When inom spoke to Jeremy Hutchinson, he was the only person still alive who remembered the young, London-based American Eliot in the period before the publication of his most famous poem.

    Hutchinson thought his mother had not slept with Eliot. Her memoir implies their relationship was full of ‘what ifs’.

  • vivienne haigh wood biography

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    Vivienne Haigh-Wood Eliot

    American poet, first wife of TS Eliot

    Vivienne Haigh-Wood Eliot

    Vivienne Haigh-Wood Eliot photographed by Lady Ottoline Morrell,

    Born

    Vivienne Haigh


    ()28 May

    Bury, Lancashire, England

    Died22 January () (aged&#;58)

    Harringay, Middlesex, England

    Resting placePinner Cemetery, London
    Occupation(s)Governess, writer
    Spouse

    T. S. Eliot

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    (m.&#;; sep.&#;)&#;

    Vivienne Haigh-Wood Eliot (also Vivien, born Vivienne Haigh; 28 May – 22 January ) was the first wife of American-British poet T. S. Eliot, whom she married in , less than three months after their introduction by mutual friends, when Vivienne was a governess in Cambridge and Eliot was studying at Oxford.[1]

    Vivienne had many serious health problems, beginning with tuberculosis of the arm as a child,[1] and the marriage appeared to exacerbate her mental health issues. Husband Eliot would not consider divor

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    T. S. Eliot's sex life. Do we really want to go there? It is a sad and desolate place. Eliot was twenty-six and, almost certainly, a frustrated virgin when, in , he married Vivienne Haigh-Wood, an Englishwoman he had known for three months. Haigh-Wood was a medically and emotionally vexed person. Her troubles included irregular and frequent menstruation, migraines, neuralgia, panic attacks, and, eventually, addiction to her medication, particularly to ether. She was pretty, ambitious, and (on her better days) vivacious. Eliot was handsome, ambitious, and the opposite of vivacious. "Exquisite and listless," Bertrand Russell described him when he met the Eliots for dinner two weeks after the marriage. "She says she married him in order to stimulate him, but finds she can't do it. Obviously he married in order to be stimulated. I think she will soon be tired of him."

    Russell was correct to intuit a tension. The Eliots seem to have discovered that they wer