Mary and Mr Eliot: A Sort of Love Story C444868687270

Author: Mary Trevelyan
Format: Paperback, 129mm x 198mm, 266g, 320 pages
Published: Faber & Faber, United Kingdom, 2023

'Completely fascinating, revelatory . . . A classic of its kind.' - WILLIAM BOYD'Compelling . . . compulsive.' - MARGARET DRABBLE, NEW STATESMAN


T.S. Eliot and Mary Trevelyan shared a close friendship - twenty-five years in each others' company: playing records; going for drives with Mary at the wheel; sharing dinners Eliot cooked in his rolled-up shirtsleeves; and attending church together. While Mary hoped it might become something more, the poet's heart was elsewhere. Using a collection of diaries, letters and pictures Mary left behind, Erica Wagner brings together this story of an unusual friendship in this intimate portrait of T.S. Eliot and Mary, a formidable woman thus far sidelined by literary history.

Mary Trevelyan (1881-1966) spent a lifetime committed to the promotion of internationalism and peaceful cooperation - especially between young people and students. Trevelyan became the Warden of the Student Movement House in Russell Square in 1938. All her life she remained deeply involved in charitable works and her published works are two remarkable memoirs, From the Ends of the Earth and I'll Walk Beside You: Letters from Belgium, September 1944-May 1945. From 1938 to 1957 she was a close friend and companion of T.S. Eliot, a period about which she wrote in her unpublished manuscript, The Pope of Russell Square.Erica Wagner is an author and critic. Her books include Gravity: Stories, Ariel's Gift: Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and the Story of Birthday Letters and Chief Engineer: Washington Roebling, The Man Who Built the Brooklyn Bridge. Literary editor of The Times for 17 years, she is now a contributing writer for the New Statesman, consulting literary editor for Harper's Bazaar and Lead Editorial Innovator for Creatd, Inc.