Painted Shadow: the Life of Vivienne Eliot, First Wife of T. S. Eliot by Seymour-Jones, Carole - 2002

New York, New York, U. S. A.: Doubleday, Doran And Company, Inc.. As New in Near Fine dust jacket. 2002. First Edition. Hardcover. 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. This book is about the long-suppressed truth about Vivienne Eliot's influence on T. S. Eliot's genius. By the time she was committed to an asylum in 1938, Vivienne Eliot was a lonely, distraught figure. Shunned by literary London, she was the "neurotic" wife whom Eliot had left behind. She had become a phantomlike shape on the fringe of Eliot's life, written out of his biography and literary history. This astonishing portrait of Vivienne Eliot gives a voice to the woman who, for seventeen years, had shared a unique literary partnership with Eliot. Vivienne longed to tell her whole story: She wrote in her diary "You who in later years will read these very words of mine will be able to trace a true history of the epoch. " She believed (as did Virginia Woolf) that she was Eliot's muse, the woman through whom he transmuted life into art. Yet Vivienne knew the secrets of his separate and secret life - which contributed to her final abandoment. The binding is maroon and grey, with deep blue end papers. 698 pages including notes, a bibliography, and index. The jacket has a bit of rubbing on the back. 8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾" tall. .