In this episode, Sara Fitzgerald joins us to discuss her new book The Silenced Muse: Emily Hale, T.S. Eliot, and the Role of a Lifetime. It is the first book-length biography of Emily Hale, the longtime love and secret creative muse of poet T.S. Eliot, who wrote Emily Hale over 1100 letters over the decades of their complicated relationship. However, their relationship was mostly forgotten by history after their letters were locked away for 50 years after their deaths, to protect the innocent. By the time the archive was opened in January 2020, few scholars understood the depth of their relationship. This book reestablishes Hale, not only as a major influence on T.S. Eliot’s body of work, but also as her own woman. From Hale’s upbringing in Chestnut Hill to their first flirtation in a Harvard Square parlor, Fitzgerald traces the intertwining lives of Hale and Eliot over a half a century that revolves around the intellectual center of gravity that is Boston.

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Sara Fitzgerald is a retired journalist, having written for The St. Petersburg Times, The Miami Herald, and the Akron Beacon-Journal. She was at The Washington Post for 15 years, where she edited the very first online edition in 1980. She started writing poems and novels as a sideline while working as journalist, and her first work of nonfiction was a biography of Elly Peterson, one of the only women with a national political reputation in mid-20th-century America. Just before T.S. Eliot’s letters to Emily Hale were opened in January 2020, she published a book of historic fiction about the pair called The Poet’s Girl, and her ongoing research in the archives resulted in this biography.