Superbly well researched.... A moving, powerful, and sympathetic biography of a talented, frail woman who deserves to be rescued from the obscurity to which she was condemned. ( The Spectator, inside front cover)
My beloved and I discovered the movie,
Tom & Viv, this spring. It's a good movie, if sometimes confusing, about the "little-known" first marriage of T.S. Eliot and Vivienne Haigh-Wood. It stars two of my favorite actors: Willem Dafoe and Miranda Richardson. After our second viewing, I wondered what would be the modern equivalent of the "moral insanity" diagnosis the docs assigned to Viv, so my beloved went to do a web search:
Her symptoms were all psychosomatic, but doctors variously guessed at anorexia, constipation, neuralgia, enteritis and 'catarrh of the intestines'. They blamed her glands, or her womb: she was thought to suffer from that Freudian affliction misogynistically known as hysteria. Beneath all the diagnoses lay the suspicion of 'moral insanity', which meant nothing more than that she possessed a normal curiosity about sex and a normal need for love. Repressive quacks stupefied her with bromides and chloral sleeping draughts.
(His trouble and strife)On her death in 1947 (after nine years in an asylum, where she was committed by Eliot and her brother), Vivienne's papers went to the Bodleian Library, Oxford University, to which she had bequeathed them. In 1984, the second Mrs. Eliot, executor of the TS Eliot estate, claimed the copyright to Vivienne's papers:
From that date the second wife was, in effect, able to silence the first. Legal opinion remains divided on the matter of ownership of the copyright. (Authors's Preface, Painted Shadow)
Carole Seymour-Jones became first curious, then sympathetic, and finally angry about the silencing and malignment and obscuring of Vivienne's role as muse and partner to T.S. Eliot. Five biographers had attempted without success to do research and write a balanced biography of Vivienne and her life with and role in Eliot's poetry. Obstacles abounded. Many told Seymour-Jones that the task was impossible. Somehow, however, she succeeded:
I became determined to discover the truth that lay behind her incarceration, to rescue her from from ignominy and disgrace, and to restore her to her rightful place in the historical record. For the next five years I would be hostage to Vivienne and her story.(ibid.)
Well written. Highly recommended.
Carole Seymour-Jones
Anchor Books. 2001.
Genre: Biography.
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