Life
Valerie Fletcher, a native of Leeds, married Eliot, almost 38 years her senior, on 10 January 1957. She had first met Eliot in August, 1949 while working as a secretary at Faber & Faber. She was a star-struck fan at first, having been a big fan of Eliot's writing since her teenage years. In a 1994 interview with The Independent newspaper she recalled a very ordinary home life of evenings spent at home playing Scrabble and eating cheese, stating "He obviously needed a happy marriage. He wouldn't die until he'd had it."
Following T.S. Eliot's 1965 death, Valerie Eliot was his most important editor and literary executor, having brought to press The Waste Land: Facsimile and Manuscripts of the Original Drafts (1971) and The Letters of T. S. Eliot: Volume 1, 1898-1922 (1989). She assisted Christopher Ricks with his edition of The Inventions of the March Hare (1996), a volume of Eliot's unpublished verse. A second volume of T.S. Eliot's letters, was edited by his widow and long-delayed. One of Valerie Eliot's most lucrative decisions as executor was granting permission for a stage musical to be based on her husband's work Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats. This became the hit Andrew Lloyd Webber musical Cats. With her portion of the proceeds Valerie Eliot established "Old Possum's Practical Trust" -- a literary charity -- as well as funded the T.S. Eliot Prize.
In late 2009, the second volume was published. The third volume, edited by Valerie Eliot and John Haffenden, followed in July 2012. She donated the £15,000 annual prize money for the T. S. Eliot Prize. Valerie Eliot died on 9 November 2012 at her home in London.
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Famous quotes containing the word life:
“For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them. I know they are as lively, and as vigorously productive, as those fabulous dragon’s teeth; and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men.”
—John Milton (1608–1674)
“The man Shelley, in very truth, is not entirely sane, and Shelley’s poetry is not entirely sane either. The Shelley of actual life is a vision of beauty and radiance, indeed, but availing nothing, effecting nothing. And in poetry, no less than in life, he is “a beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain.””
—Matthew Arnold (1822–1888)
“Franceska: I was happy in the life I built up for myself. I put a fine high wall of music around me and nothing could touch me. I was safe and secure. And then you had to come along and knock it all down and I hate you for that.
Maxwell: On the contrary, you love me.”
—Muriel Box (b. 1905)