The Letters of T. S. Eliot Volume 2: 1923-1925

These long-anticipated letters are shrewd, graceful and courteous.

The human narrative is more fully told than ever before by these two volumes, from Vivien's excitable early letter describing how Eliot's friend the philosopher Bertrand Russell is "all over me" (though it is not until Volume Two that the footnotes acknowledge there may have been an affair) to her paranoid but poignant pursuit of Eliot via intermediaries 10 years later. In between, however, there are also letters of affection, complete with lovers' nicknames (Wee and Wonkypenky), and the doomed saga of their search for mutual health and happiness in a country cottage. ... What is new and valuable in these letters for admirers of the inspired poet, acute critic and urbane editor is the full portrait of a man living with the esteem of having written The Waste Land.'

(An) essential book - and the prospect of Eliot's whole corpus being properly edited and made fully available over the next few years is one of the great publishing events of our time.