Painted Shadow: A Life of Vivienne Eliot
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Book Overview
"It was only when I saw Vivie in the asylum for the last time I realized I had done something very wrong.--She was as sane as I was." Maurice Haigh-Wood, Vivienne Eliot's brother, shortly before his... This description may be from another edition of this product.
Format:Hardcover
Language:English
ISBN:0094792704
ISBN13:9780094792708
Release Date:January 2001
Publisher:Not Avail
Length:702 Pages
Weight:2.65 lbs.
Customer Reviews
1 rating
Absorbing and excellent
Published by Thriftbooks.com User , 18 years ago
This is a superb study of the frustration that a bad marriage can wreak on two (mostly) admirable individuals: Vivienne Haig, sexually hungry and emotionally fragile, and Thomas Stearns Eliot, a homosexual who blithely imagined that marriage would cure him. The chafing these two endured makes for painful reading, though the author tells her story with such dispassion and aplomb that she mitigates their pain. Each marital partner damaged the other: for instance, whereas Vivienne openly slept with Bertrand Russell, Eliot openly sought "German Jack" as his lover. Everyone around them was disappointed and dismayed--increasingly so. Only when the two partners worked together on literary projects did their troubled marriage blossom. But when Eliot ran away from Vivienne in 1926 and then for years cruelly evaded her, she fell apart; and after she apparently threatened to expose his sexual preference, Eliot had her committed from 1938 till she died in 1947. This biography tells what the film TOM AND VIV omits: the sexual hostility that fueled their marriage. Highly recommended.
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