Painted Shadow: The Life of Vivienne Eliot, First Wife of T. S. Eliot [Paperback]

Carole Seymour-Jones (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 14, 2003

By the time Vivienne Eliot was committed to an asylum for what would be the final nine years of her life, she had been abandoned by her husband T.S. Eliot and shunned by literary London. Yet Vivienne was neither insane nor insignificant. She generously collaborated in her husband’s literary efforts, taking dictation, editing his drafts, and writing articles for his magazine, Criterion. Her distinctive voice can be heard in his poetry. And paradoxically, it was the unhappiness of the Eliots’ marriage that inspired some of the poet’s most distinguished work, from The Family Reunion to The Waste Land. This first biography ever written about Vivienne draws on hundreds of previously unpublished papers, journals and letters to portray a spontaneous, loving, but fragile woman who had an important influence on her husband’s work, as well as a great poet whose behavior was hampered by psychological and sexual impulses he could not fully acknowledge.
Intriguing and provocative, Painted Shadow gracefully rescues Vivienne Eliot from undeserved obscurity, and is indispensable for anyone wishing to understand T.S. Eliot, Vivienne, or the world in which they traveled.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Fascinating and controversial.” –The Washington Post

“Fascinating and hugely successful” –Sunday Times (London)

“A detailed, in-depth look at an extraordinary and complex marriage.” –The Houston Chronicle

“This work makes a definite contribution to our understanding of Eliot.” –Library Journal

“Superbly well-researched and extremely distressing. . . . A moving, powerful, and sympathetic biography of a talented, frail woman who deserves to rescued from the obscurity to which she was condemned.” –The Spectator (UK)

“If you want to know how ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ came to be penned, this homey little volume provides as good an interpretation of sexual dynamics as any. Highly recommended to all literature lovers.” –The Tampa Tribune

“Brilliant, deeply researched, utterly compelling. . . . [A] magnificent study.” –The Guardian (UK)

“Knowledgeable. . . Fair and subtle.” –The Daily Telegraph (UK)

“ A nuanced portrait of an independent spirit coming unhinged. . . . A chronicle of a fine mind–highly unstable but not necessarily insane.” –Publishers Weekly

“Unsettling. . . . Gives us some intriguing ways of looking at Eliot and his work.” –San Jose Mercury News

“[Seymour-Jones’s] portrait of Vivienne is fair, sympathetic, and well-supported, making her a far more real and vivid figure than in most studies of Eliot.” –Chicago Tribune

“Gripping . . . immaculately researched. . . . Sensational.” –The Observer (UK)

From the Inside Flap

By the time Vivienne Eliot was committed to an asylum for what would be the final nine years of her life, she had been abandoned by her husband T.S. Eliot and shunned by literary London. Yet Vivienne was neither insane nor insignificant. She generously collaborated in her husband's literary efforts, taking dictation, editing his drafts, and writing articles for his magazine, Criterion. Her distinctive voice can be heard in his poetry. And paradoxically, it was the unhappiness of the Eliots' marriage that inspired some of the poet's most distinguished work, from The Family Reunion to The Waste Land. This first biography ever written about Vivienne draws on hundreds of previously unpublished papers, journals and letters to portray a spontaneous, loving, but fragile woman who had an important influence on her husband's work, as well as a great poet whose behavior was hampered by psychological and sexual impulses he could not fully acknowledge.
Intriguing and provocative, Painted Shadow gracefully rescues Vivienne Eliot from undeserved obscurity, and is indispensable for anyone wishing to understand T.S. Eliot, Vivienne, or the world in which they traveled.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 736 pages
• Publisher: Anchor (October 14, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385499930
• ISBN-13: 978-0385499934
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 1.4 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #404,236 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

25 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Bangs and Whimpers, December 5, 2004

By 

zaranda "zaranda" (Winnetka, CA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Painted Shadow: The Life of Vivienne Eliot, First Wife of T. S. Eliot (Paperback)

700 pages of commonplace minutiae is probably tons more than anyone wants to know about Vivienne Eliot but, even allowing for such proffered particulars as V.E.'s 1934 cockroach problems, the story told by Carole Seymour-Jones is fascininating...and repulsive. If they are ever to pick up The Collected Works again without a shudder, devotees of T. S. Eliot will have to study a juggling denial/avoidance, while those who regard him as little more than a purveyor of era-bogged, clever-dick party pieces, will receive broad permission from this volume to dismissively despise him as an appalling, conniving, cheating, embezzling, slug-under-a-rock. (Of the "Uncollected" works , the less said the better.)


Difficult as it may be to generate sympathy for a person who set up household shrines to Oswald Mosley, Jones leaves us little doubt that Vivienne Eliot was certainly as talented as many another Bloomsburian, disgracefully dealt with--abused--by Eliot and her own family, but simplemindedly, to her captive last, holding out for the theory that Tom was not to blame.


With so much material to deal with, it is not surprising Jones occasionally seems to lose track of precisely what went before (early on she lays it out that TSE at least enabled V's affair with Bertrand Russell, certainly profited by it, possibly connived at it; hundreds of pages later Jones speaks of how hurt Eliot was by her infidelity). Jones' oracular certainty of who-felt-what, who-thought-what, who-did-what-why and her psychological pontificating become irksome to anyone not willing to concede her omniscience.But for a microscopic view of a time-dated literary milieu and its peculiar, self-aggrandizing denizens, and a disturbing look at what intellectual creeps can get up to, this book will reward even the non-trivialists among us.

7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Vivienne eliot finally has her day, February 2, 2009

By 

Carol W. Bachofner "bleary-eyed reader" (Rockland, Maine) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Painted Shadow: The Life of Vivienne Eliot, First Wife of T. S. Eliot (Paperback)

I read the book in 2002 while living temporarily in London. I disagree with critics who pan this biography, and say instead that it is a refreshing thing that this woman, long in the grave ( I blame TS Eliot in part), has finally been given a chance to be shown as a real woman, as something other than a footnote of Eliot's fame. What struck a chord with me was, in part, the unveiling of a tricky malfeasance by TS Eliot and Vivienne's brother. If she went insane, it was the two of these men who drove her into the asylum!

The woman was brilliant in her own right as a writer, reviewer, as well as editor and advisor (along with Pound) to TS as he composed the rantings that would become The Wasteland. In fact, I have a hunch that part of the writing is hers, not TS. As a woman who once suffered from early peri-menopause, I can say that Vivienne was likely such a sufferer. In her day, we did not help these women because we chose to lump all such "female complaints" as crazy, hypochondriac ravings, or as manipulative. I think the book shows the pitiable state she was in at the end of her life, and I take her behaviour to be at worst sad and at best brave. Seymour-Jones wrote a masterful biography. Those who moan on and on about its being ponderous or whining are simply WRONG. A biography does not need to be simply scholarly. Sometimes being empathetic is enough.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Twitter in Bloomsbury, February 1, 2009

By 

Beverly Seaton (Alexandria, OH United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Painted Shadow: The Life of Vivienne Eliot, First Wife of T. S. Eliot (Paperback)

This book, with much more detail than I wanted to know, opens up the "secret" life of Eliot as no other writer has done. Vivienne is no sympathetic character here, but she clearly did not deserve the way she was treated by Tom and his buddies. While he needed to keep his homosexuality in the closet for good reasons, it was a criminal offense, he could have managed to contain his hatred of women physically by leaving her soon after the marriage. It does not appear that he used the marriage as camouflage, but he certainly behaved as if he did. I suppose one can defend the oversupply of detail as needed because her subject is still "controversial," why I do not know. The book can also be recommended as a depressing picture of the treatment of mentally ill people at that time. And her portrayal of the social set to which they belonged reminds me of nothing so much as the twitter society of today's teenagers, all gossip and drama queen behavior, floating at a level of pampered imbecility.