TS Eliot letters reveal anguish over failure of first marriage

Correspondence to be published this month challenges view that poet was cold towards his wife Vivien as she suffered mental illness

TS Eliot’s desperation to escape the “hideous farce” of his first marriage to Vivien Haigh-Wood and her refusal to believe their relationship had reached its final chapter have been revealed in previously unpublished letters.

The full extent of their mutual anguish is conveyed through correspondence with close friends as well as each other, which casts new light on one of the 20^th century’s most important writers. The contents challenge an assumption that he was intolerably cold towards her when she was suffering an obvious mental decline.