Emily Hale
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Emily Hale (October 27, 1891 – October 12, 1969) was an American speech and drama teacher, who was the longtime muse and confidante of the poet
T. S. Eliot Thomas Stearns Eliot (26 September 18884 January 1965) was a poet, essayist and playwright.Bush, Ronald. "T. S. Eliot's Life and Career", in John A Garraty and Mark C. Carnes (eds), ''American National Biography''. New York: Oxford University ...
. There were 1,131 letters from Eliot to Hale deposited in
Princeton University Library Princeton University Library is the main library system of Princeton University. With holdings of more than 7 million books, 6 million microforms, and 48,000 linear feet of manuscripts, it is among the largest libraries in the world by number of ...
in 1956; they were made accessible to the public on January 2, 2020.


Early life and career

Hale was born in
East Orange, New Jersey East Orange is a City (New Jersey), city in Essex County, New Jersey, Essex County, in the U.S. state of New Jersey. As of the 2020 United States census, the city's population was 69,612, an increase of 5,342 (+8.3%) from the 2010 United States ...
, on October 27, 1891. Her father was Edward Hale, an architect who became a Unitarian minister and taught at
Harvard Divinity School Harvard Divinity School (HDS) is one of the constituent schools of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The school's mission is to educate its students either in the religious studies, academic study of religion or for leadership role ...
. Her mother Emily (née Milliken) had become a "permanent mental invalid" after the death of her infant son. Hale lived at home with her father in Chestnut Hill, outside of Boston, until he died when she was 26. The Perkinses later moved from Seattle to Boston, and Hale frequently traveled with them to Europe. The three of them spent many summers in
Chipping Campden Chipping Campden is a market town in the Cotswold (district), Cotswold district of Gloucestershire, England. It is notable for its terraced High Street, dating from the 14th to the 17th centuries. A wool trading centre in the Middle Ages, Chipp ...
, England, in the 1930s, and hosted Eliot while they vacationed there. Hale graduated from
Miss Porter's School Miss Porter's School (MPS) is a private college preparatory school for girls founded in 1843 in Farmington, Connecticut. The school draws students from many of the 50 U.S. states, as well as from abroad. International students comprised 14% i ...
, but never attended college. After her father died in 1918, she took a job as a dorm matron at
Simmons University Simmons University (previously Simmons College) is a private university in Boston, Massachusetts, United States. It was established in 1899 by clothing manufacturer John Simmons. In 2018, it reorganized its structure and changed its name to a ...
(then College), where she had helped organize the drama club as a volunteer in 1916. She later was promoted to speech instructor at Simmons. She went on to serve as a speech and drama teacher at
Milwaukee-Downer College Milwaukee-Downer College was a women's college in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in operation from 1895 until its merger with Lawrence University in 1964. History Milwaukee-Downer College was established in 1895 with the merger of two institutions: Milwau ...
(1921–1929) (now part of Lawrence University),
Scripps College Scripps College is a private liberal arts women's college in Claremont, California. It was founded as a member of the Claremont Colleges in 1926, a year after the consortium's formation. Journalist and philanthropist Ellen Browning Scripps pr ...
(1932–1934), and
Smith College Smith College is a Private university, private Liberal arts colleges in the United States, liberal arts Women's colleges in the United States, women's college in Northampton, Massachusetts, United States. It was chartered in 1871 by Sophia Smit ...
(1936–1942), as well as the all-girls
Concord Academy Concord Academy (also known as CA) is a coeducational, Independent school, independent University-preparatory school, college-preparatory school for boarding and day students in Concord, Massachusetts. CA educates approximately 400 students in ...
and Abbot Academy preparatory schools. Hale was an active member of the Unitarian Church and also the
League of Women Voters The League of Women Voters (LWV) is a nonpartisan American nonprofit political organization. Founded in 1920, its ongoing major activities include Voter registration, registering voters, providing voter information, boosting voter turnout and adv ...
, and she was a volunteer at the
Sophia Smith Collection The Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College is an internationally recognized repository of manuscripts, photographs, periodicals and other primary sources in women's history. General One of the largest recognized repositories of manuscripts, a ...
.


Relationship with Eliot

Eliot recalled first falling in love with Hale in 1912 when he was a graduate student studying philosophy at Harvard, and Eliot declared his love for her shortly before leaving for Europe in 1914; Eliot later said that Hale did not reciprocate his feelings, but he continued to write her and to send her flowers for her theatrical performances after he left. However, in June 1915, Eliot married
Vivienne Haigh-Wood Vivienne Haigh-Wood Eliot (also Vivien, born Vivienne Haigh; 28 May 1888 – 22 January 1947) was the first wife of American-British poet T. S. Eliot, whom she married in 1915, less than three months after their introduction by mutual friends, ...
, and his preserved correspondence with Hale did not materially resume until 1930. From 1930 until 1956, Eliot wrote more than a thousand letters to Hale, visiting her in California over the New Year's holidays in 1932–33, before deciding to seek a formal separation from his wife when he returned to England in 1933. However, he told Hale he could not seek a divorce because of the strictures of his Anglican faith. Hale and Eliot spent the summers from 1935 to 1939 together in Campden, Gloucestershire, as the guests of her aunt and uncle, the Perkinses. In 1935, Hale and Eliot visited
Burnt Norton ''Burnt Norton'' is the first poem of T. S. Eliot's ''Four Quartets''. He created it while working on his play ''Murder in the Cathedral'', and it was first published in his ''Collected Poems 1909–1935'' (1936). The poem's title refers to Bu ...
, an abandoned manor house in
Gloucestershire Gloucestershire ( , ; abbreviated Glos.) is a Ceremonial counties of England, ceremonial county in South West England. It is bordered by Herefordshire to the north-west, Worcestershire to the north, Warwickshire to the north-east, Oxfordshire ...
. (Eliot biographers had believed this visit occurred in 1934, but the Eliot-Hale correspondence revealed that the visit occurred in 1935.) 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, an assertion backed up in the Eliot letters themselves.
World War II World War II or the Second World War (1 September 1939 – 2 September 1945) was a World war, global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies of World War II, Allies and the Axis powers. World War II by country, Nearly all of the wo ...
intervened, and Hale and Eliot would not meet again until 1946, by which time Eliot was about to turn 58 and Hale, 55; 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. Eliot had told Hale that he would marry her if he could, so she was shocked and saddened when he changed his mind. After 1947, they continued to be friends, but their letters and visits were less frequent. 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. Hale's own feelings for Eliot are largely unknown, partly because Eliot arranged for nearly all of her letters to be burned after he married his much younger secretary, Esmé Valerie Fletcher, in 1957. Eliot's last letter to Hale in the Princeton collection was written in 1957.


Life after Eliot

In 1957, after Eliot remarried, Hale was forced to retire from Abbot Academy because she had reached the school's mandatory retirement age. While some Eliot biographers wrote that Hale was hospitalized following a nervous breakdown, no evidence is cited. 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", but "I didn't necessarily find that to be the case. I felt she got over this blow and kept living." After her retirement, Hale acted in a number of well-received community theater productions, and kept in contact with her friends and past students. She also taught for a period at Oak Grove School in
Vassalboro, Maine Vassalboro (originally Vassalborough) is a town in Kennebec County, Maine, United States. The population was 4,520 at the 2020 United States census, 2020 census. Vassalboro includes the villages of Riverside, Getchell's Corner, North Vassalboro, ...
, and finally died in
Concord, Massachusetts Concord () is a town in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States. In the 2020 United States census, 2020 census, the town population was 18,491. The United States Census Bureau considers Concord part of Greater Boston. The town center is n ...
. 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." Eliot never responded, and he died soon after in 1965.


Letter archive

Hale was a friend of the
Princeton University Princeton University is a private university, private Ivy League research university in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the List of Colonial ...
English professor, Willard Thorp, and his wife Margaret Farrand Thorp. 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. 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 October 12, 1969, in Concord, and accordingly, the archive was opened to scholars only in January 2020, revealing 1,131 letters from Eliot to Hale dating from the period 1930 to 1957. The letters included information about the evolving relationship between Hale and Eliot, and in some cases contradicted established published sources. Initially, the letters could only be read in person at Princeton Library, and copies could not be made. Access to the letters became even more restricted following COVID-19-related shutdowns. On January 30, 2023, the Eliot estate made all the letters, and additional materials from the Eliot archive, available to the public for free, online. The number of letters, by year, are as follows: 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".


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". 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 written at the instigation of his second wife, Valerie Eliot. Others believe it may have been a reaction to his unhappiness with Hale's decision to archive his letters for future release. After an initial review of the letters, Eliot scholar Frances Dickey told ''
The Washington Post ''The Washington Post'', locally known as ''The'' ''Post'' and, informally, ''WaPo'' or ''WP'', is an American daily newspaper published in Washington, D.C., the national capital. It is the most widely circulated newspaper in the Washington m ...
'' 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". Eliot biographer
Lyndall Gordon Lyndall Gordon (born 4 November 1941) is a British-based biographical and former academic writer, known for her literary biographies. She is a senior research fellow at St Hilda's College, Oxford. Life Born in Cape Town, she had her undergradua ...
told ''
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'' 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". 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". He highlighted passages of works that Eliot told Hale she had inspired, including ''
The Waste Land ''The Waste Land'' is a poem by T. S. Eliot, widely regarded as one of the most important English-language poems of the 20th century and a central work of modernist poetry. Published in 1922, the 434-line poem first appeared in the United ...
''.


See also

*'' The Archivist'', a fictional book (1998) by Martha Cooley, based on the archived Eliot letters * List of sealed archives


References


Further reading

* Fitzgerald, Sara (2024). ''The Silenced Muse: Emily Hale, T. S. Eliot, and the Role of a Liftetime.'' Rowman and Littlefield, * *Dickey, Frances, "
'May the Record Speak:' The Correspondence of T. S. Eliot and Emily Hale,"
' Twentieth Century Literature, December 2020. *Gordon, Lyndall (2022). ''The Hyacinth Girl,'' ISBN 978-0-349-01211-7. *Fitzgerald, Sara, "Religion, Rites, and Emily Hale,
''The T. S. Eliot Studies Annual,'' Volume 5.
*Fitzgerald, Sara, "Poetry, Taste, and Emily Hale,"
The T. S. Eliot Studies Annual
'
Volume 6.
*Fitzgerald, Sara, ''"Rediscovering Emily Hale,
Journal of the T. S. Eliot Society (U.K.) 2020.
*Fitzgerald, Sara "Because You are You": Emily Hale's Letters
''Journal of the T. S. Eliot Society (U.K.), 2022''
*Dickey, Frances and Fitzgerald, Sara, eds., "In Her Own Words: Emily Hale's Introduction to T. S. Eliot's Letters,
The T. S. Eliot Studies Annual, Volume 3.
' *Whittier-Ferguson, John, Dickey, Frances, Gordon, Lyndall, Fitzgerald, Sara, Stergiopoulou, Katerina, Christensen, Karen, Brooker, Jewel Spears, Cuda, Anthony, McIntire, Gabrielle, "Special Forum: First Readings of the Eliot-Hale Archive,
''The T. S. Eliot Studies Annual,'' Volume 3.
*Fitzgerald, Sara, "Emily Hale: The Beginning of All Our Exploring,
''The T. S. Eliot Studies Annual,'' Volume 3.
*Fitzgerald, Sara, "The Love of Her Life: Emily Hale's Theatrical Career,"
The T. S. Eliot Studies Annual, Volume 4.
'


Literature

* Lyndall Gordon: ''The hyacinth girl : T. S. Eliot's hidden muse'', London : Virago, 2022,


External links


"The love of a ghost for a ghost": T.S. Eliot on his letters to Emily Hale
Harvard University's Houghton Library blog (January 2, 2020)
Emily Hale Papers
at the Smith College Archives, Smith College Special Collections
Emily Hale Letters from T.S. Eliot (mostly 1931–1940)
Princeton University Libraries Finding Aid
Emily Hale Letters: free digital edition of the complete surviving correspondence between T. S. Eliot and Emily Hale
T. S. Eliot Estate {{DEFAULTSORT:Hale, Emily 1891 births 1969 deaths People from Boston Milwaukee-Downer College faculty Smith College people Scripps College faculty Simmons University faculty Muses (persons) Miss Porter's School alumni 20th-century American women educators 20th-century American educators T. S. Eliot People from East Orange, New Jersey