Valerie Eliot, 1926–2012

In the mid-1950s, T.S. Eliot seemed close to death. The American poet was tortured by the memory of his disastrous first marriage, to Vivienne Haigh-Wood, who died in an asylum in 1947 after inspiring some of his best, and bleakest, work. Eliot’s savior came in an unlikely form: the handsome and practical Valerie Fletcher. After the couple married, in 1957, when he was 68 and she was 30, the reclusive intellectual underwent a remarkable change. Eliot was suddenly boasting to friends that he was “the luckiest man in the world.” At parties, the newlyweds would hold hands and gaze at each other like lovesick teenagers. Not everyone appreciated the poet’s newfound joy. “Tom Eliot is now curiously dull,” remarked author Aldous Huxley.

Born in the north of England, Valerie became besotted with Eliot at age 14 when she heard a recording of his poem “Journey of the Magi.” “She decided that she must work for this most eminent of figures and took a secretarial course with this express purpose,” said The Times (U.K.). She moved to London against her parents’ wishes, and in 1950 became Eliot’s secretary at the publishing house Faber & Faber. The poet slowly fell in love with his dedicated and unflappable assistant, and proposed “by slipping a note into a batch of letters which he gave her for typing,” said The Daily Telegraph (U.K.).

The Eliots moved into an apartment in London’s upscale Kensington neighborhood, where they hosted famous visitors, including composer Igor Stravinsky and comedian Groucho Marx. But more often they passed the evenings alone together, reading to each other, “eating cheese, and playing Scrabble,” said the Associated Press. “He obviously needed a happy marriage,” Valerie later remarked. “He wouldn’t die until he’d had it.”

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After Eliot’s death, in 1965, Valerie became his executor, and steadfastly refused to cooperate with would-be biographers, in keeping with his wishes. While she rarely gave interviews, she was moved to defend Eliot after the release of the movie Tom & Viv, which portrayed the poet’s first wife as a free spirit neglected by an unfeeling husband. “Tom tried very hard and for a very long time to make a go of it,” she said, “and he’s never given credit for that, is he?”