Painted shadow - Carole Seymour-Jones

This widely acclaimed biography is the first life of Vivienne Eliot and completely belies the long-held view of her as merely a demented woman. When Tom and Vivienne married in 1915, they had known each other only a few months. The predatory and exploitative Bertrand Russell drew Vivienne into a sexual relationship and the couple joined the emotional merry-go-round of the Bloomsbury and Garsington circles. Vivienne flourished for a while, helping her husband with his literary work, but was committed to an asylum in 1938, five years after Eliot deserted her, a spontaneous, loving woman who had become a sad and lonely figure.

Out of this emotional turbulence came the most important English poem of the twentieth century: The Waste Land. Seymour-Jones shows that it cannot be understood without reference to the marriage. Based on papers both privately owned and in university library archives, and drawing on Vivienne Eliot's own writings held in the Bodleian Library.