A story about TS Eliot’s life offers a convenient segue to write about a genre of literary biography that has long lurked in my mind asking for an essay: great women who write about great women, and why Lyndall Gordon is a master of the genre.
Drawing on newly released letters from the poet to Emily Hale, with whom he maintained a decades-long, mostly epistolary affair, “The Hyacinth Girl,” by Lyndall Gordon, reconsiders his life and work.