Emily Hale

Emily Hale (27 October 1891 – 12 October 1969) was an American speech and drama teacher, who was the longtime muse and confidante of the poet T. S. Eliot. Exactly 1,131 letters from Eliot to Hale were deposited in Princeton University Library in 1956 and were described as one of the best-known sealed archives in the world for many years. Per Hale's instructions, the letters were opened in January 2020, 50 years after Hale's death. The same day, Harvard’s Houghton Library issued an unexpected statement that Eliot had prepared in 1960, to be opened when Hale's archives were released. Princeton then released Hale's summary of their relationship.
Early life and career.
Hale was born in East Orange, New Jersey, on 27 October 1891. Her father was the Reverend Edward Hale, an architect who became a Unitarian Minister and taught at Harvard Divinity School. Her mother Emily (née Milliken) had become a "permanent mental invalid" after the death of her infant son, and Hale was brought up by her aunt Edith Perkins and her uncle, the Unitarian Minister Reverend John Carroll Perkins. The couple lived in Boston but spent their summers from 1930 to 1939 in Chipping Campden, England, with Hale also attending.
She graduated from Miss Porter's School, and she was a speech and drama teacher at various women's colleges from 1916 onwards, including Simmons University (then College) (1916–1921), Milwaukee-Downer College (1921–1928) (now part of Lawrence University), Scripps College (1932–1934), and Smith College (1936–1942), as well as the all-girls Concord Academy and Abbot Academy preparatory schools at the end of her teaching career.
Hale was an active member of the Unitarian Church and also the League of Women Voters, and she was a volunteer on the Sophia Smith Collection.
Relationship with Eliot.
Hale met with Eliot in 1912 when he was a graduate student studying philosophy at Harvard, and Eliot declared his love for her shortly before leaving for Europe in 1914; biographers have recorded that Eliot left that meeting with the impression that Hale did have similar feelings. However, in June 1915, Eliot married Vivienne Haigh-Wood, and his correspondence with Hale did not materially resume until 1927. From 1930 until 1956, Eliot wrote over a thousand letters to Hale. Eliot visited Hale in California over the New Year's holidays in 1932-33, then decided to seek a formal separation from his wife when he returned to England in 1933. Eliot told Hale he could not seek a divorce because of the strictures of his Anglican faith.
Hale and Eliot spent the summers from 1935 to 1939 together in Campden, Gloucestershire, as the guests of her aunt and uncle, the Perkinses. In 1934, Hale and Eliot visited Burnt Norton, an abandoned manor house in Gloucestershire. This visit provided the inspiration for much of Eliot's 1935 poem "Burnt Norton", in which scholars have surmised that the "you" in the poem was Hale, and their relationship was the "we." While Hale never openly regarded herself as Eliot's muse, it is known she identified herself in various other Eliot poems, when teaching her students at various colleges. In a memoir released by Princeton Library in mid-January 2020, Hale said that Eliot had told her that "Burnt Norton" was his love poem to her.
World War II intervened, and Hale and Eliot would not meet again until 1946, by which time Eliot was 58 and Hale was 55; however, after the death of Vivienne in 1947, Eliot arranged a meeting with Hale at which he told her he no longer could marry her. Hale had anticipated that they would live together when Vivienne died and was shocked and saddened when she learned Eliot had decided not to marry her. After 1947, Hale and Eliot would only meet fleetingly, but would still correspond, although at a reduced frequency.
Eliot's relationship with Hale was said by some biographers to provide Eliot with a model of a silent, ethereal woman and chaste love that could be indefinitely sustained. Hale's own feelings for Eliot are largely unknown, partly because Eliot burned all of her letters after he married his much younger secretary Esmé Valerie Fletcher, in 1957. Eliot's last letter to Hale was in 1956.
Life after Eliot.
In 1957, recently retired from the Abbot Academy, Hale was admitted to Massachusetts General Hospital for a "breakdown". One of Hale's biographers, Sara Fitzgerald, said "Emily Hale is painted as someone who fell apart, who had a nervous breakdown after loving Eliot for so many years and seeing him marry another woman", and "I didn’t necessarily find that to be the case. I felt she got over this blow and kept living". After her retirement from the Abbot Academy, Hale acted in a number of well-received plays, and kept in contact with her friends and past students. She also taught for a period at Oak Grove School in Vassalboro, Maine, and finally died in Concord, Massachusetts.
Fitzgerald records that Hale wrote a final letter to Eliot in the early 1960s, in which she told him it was "'difficult' for her to consider her life to be important just because they had been connected," though the letter "ended on an upbeat note, hoping that they could still be friends." Eliot never responded, and he died soon after in 1965.
Letter archive.
Hale was a friend of the Princeton University English professor, Willard Thorp, and his wife Margaret Farrand Thorp. From 1942, she explored with Thorp the idea of keeping Eliot's letters in the Princeton University Library for safekeeping, finally deciding to do this in July 1956. Hale specified that the letters should be kept closed for fifty full years after the latter of her or Eliot's death. Hale died after Eliot, on 12 October 1969 in Concord, and therefore, the archive was only opened to scholars in January 2020, revealing 1,131 letters from Eliot to Hale dating from the period 1930 to 1956. The letters included information about the evolving relationship between Hale and Eliot, and in some cases contradicted established published sources.
The letters can only be read in person at the library; a compilation of the letters is now being prepared, and its editor, John Haffenden, has said he anticipates it will be published in 2021. Eliot's copyright still applies to the letters.
The number of letters, by year, are as follows:
Hale included a cover note with the letters saying, "The memory of the years when we were most together and so happy are mine always", and also, "I accepted conditions as they were offered under the unnatural code which surrounded us, so that perhaps more sophisticated persons than I will not be surprised to learn the truth about us".
Posthumous statement.
In a surprise to scholars, Eliot's estate simultaneously issued a written statement by him to be opened on the release of Hale's letters. Eliot's statement said that he "never had any sexual relations with Emily Hale", and it appeared to reject the notion that Hale was his muse: "Emily Hale would have killed the poet in me; Vivienne nearly was the death of me, but she kept the poet alive".
However, some commentators immediately contrasted Eliot's statement with some of the early releases of his letters which state, "You have made me perfectly happy: that is, happier than I have ever been in my life", and they speculated that Eliot's harsh statement might have been a reaction to his unhappiness with Hale's decision to archive his letters for future release. After an initial review of the letters, Eliot scholar Frances Dickey told the "Washington Post" that "he basically confesses his love for Emily Hale and tells her that she's the great love of his life", and "that he's been writing for her all of these years, and he even names the places in his poetry where he has paid tribute to her or honored her in some way". Eliot biographer Lyndall Gordon told "PBS News" that the contents of the letters far exceeded Dickey and Gordon's expectations. "Eliot was very emotional and very explicit about how much he loved her and how important she was to his work". Gordon also added, "Eliot lays it all bare. That’s striking, in part, because for a long time, it was 'unfashionable' to think of Eliot as a confessional poet". He highlighted passages of works that Eliot told Hale she had inspired, including "The Waste Land".