Mary and Mr Eliot: A Sort of Love Story

I loved the integrity of this intimate record taking us back to wartime and post-war England. Mary Trevelyan’s forthright honesty about Eliot goes in tandem with Erica Wagner’s telling narrative and insights. As the two move together across a chronicle of twenty years, what emerges is more than a memoir of knowing a famous poet; it’s a dual portrait of a woman who hides nothing and a celebrity given to secrecy. A spirited dauntlessness is the core of Trevelyan’s character, perfectly matched with Erica Wagner’s placings of what was said, lifting a private story onto the world stage. An inventive co-narrative brings to light a long-ago relationship between a poet already amongst the immortals and an independent woman who dared to say exactly what she thought. How deftly Wagner transforms a scrapbook filled with gems into a revealing and ultimately tragic story.

Reading this elegant, clever and moving book is like looking at Eliot through a lancet window: we get a tightly-focused and revealing view of one of his most important friendships, and a valuable understanding of how it relates to the panorama of his whole personality. An exemplary ’sort of’ biography.