Vivienne Haigh-Wood Eliot (28 May 1888 â€" 22 January 1947) was an English governess and writer who became the first wife of the American poet T. S. Eliot (1888â€"1965). Her legacy, and the extent to which she influenced Eliot's work, has been the subject of much debate. She has been seen variously as a neurotic femme fatale who enticed the patrician Eliot into an inappropriate and disastrous marriage, or as his muse, without whom some of his most important work would never have appeared. His second wife claimed the copyright of Haigh-Wood's writings in 1984, including her private diaries, which has complicated the research into her role in Eliot's life.
Haigh-Wood met Eliot in Oxford in March 1915, while he was studying philosophy at Merton College and she was working as a governess in Cambridge; they were married in Hampstead Register Office three months later. They remained married until her death in 1947, but Haigh-Wood's poor physical and mental health, and Eliot's apparent intolerance of it, produced a stormy relationship, made worse by her apparently having an affair with the philosopher Bertrand Russell. Eliot arranged for a formal separation in February 1933, and thereafter shunned her entirely, hiding from her and instructing his friends, including members of the Bloomsbury Group and the publisher Faber & Faber, where he was a director, not to tell her where he was.
Her brother, Maurice, had her committed to an asylum in 1938, after she was found wandering the streets of London at five o'clock in the morning, apparently asking whether Eliot had been beheaded. Apart from one escape attempt, she remained there until she died nine years later at the age of 58 â€" ostensibly after a heart attack, though there is a suspicion that she took an overdose â€" the year before Eliot won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Carole Seymour-Jones writes that it was out of the turmoil of the marriage that Eliot produced The Waste Land, one of the 20th century's finest poems. Eliot's sister-in-law, Theresa, said of the relationship: "Vivienne ruined Tom as a man, but she made him as a poet."
Early life
Haigh-Wood was born in Knowsley Street, Bury, Lancashire, the first child of Charles Haigh-Wood (1854â€"1927), an artist and member of the Royal Academy of Arts, and his wife Rose Esther, née Robinson (died 1941). Charles was local to the area but his wife was born in London where the couple had been living, and they had returned to Bury for an exhibition of Charles's paintings at a gentleman's club, with Rose Esther heavily pregnant. The journey may have triggered the birth earlier than expected, and Haigh-Wood was born in Lancashire rather than London.
She was registered at birth as Vivienne Haigh, though as an adult she called herself Haigh-Wood. Her paternal grandfather was Charles Wood, a gilder and picture framer from Bolton, so her father called himself Charles Haigh-Wood to distinguish himself. The "Haigh" came from his mother, Mary Haigh, originally from Dublin. Mary Haigh had inherited seven semi-detached houses in Kingstown (now Dún Laoghaire), a Dublin suburb, which gave the family financial stability, allowing Haigh-Wood's father to study at the Manchester Art College and the Royal Academy School in London.
Charles Haigh-Wood inherited his mother's property when she died, as well as the family home at 14 Albion Place, Walmersley Road, Bury, and he became a landlord, which allowed him to move his wife and Haigh-Wood to Hampstead, a fashionable part of north London. They settled into a house there at 3 Compayne Gardens around 1891. Haigh-Wood's brother, Maurice, was born there in 1896; he went on to train at Sandhurst and fought during the First World War. Although the family was clearly well-to-do, Seymour-Jones writes that Haigh-Wood was ashamed of her connection to Lancashire, perceived as working-class, and was left with a sense of inferiority that made her self-conscious and snobbish, especially when mixing with Eliot's aristocratic London friends.
Health and education
Little is known of her education. She played the piano, painted, took ballet lessons, was a good swimmer and worked for a short time as a governess for a family in Cambridge. She had multiple health problems. She was diagnosed with tuberculosis of the bone in her left arm when she was a child; this was before the discovery of antibiotics and apparently little could be done about it. She was treated by Sir Frederick Treves and said she had had so many operations, she had no memory of her life before the age of seven.
She was also plagued by heavy, irregular menstruation, to her great embarrassment, and severe pre-menstrual tension, which led to mood swings, fainting spells and migraines. She would insist on washing her own bedlinen, often twice a day, and would take her sheets home with her to clean when on holiday, once leading a hotel to claim she had stolen them, to Eliot's dismay. She apparently felt unable to ask her mother for help. Eventually her mother took her to a doctor who prescribed potassium bromide to sedate her, which probably meant he had diagnosed "hysteria," a common label for difficult women. Virginia Woolf famously described Haigh-Wood on 8 November 1930 in her diary:
Oh â€" Vivienne! Was there ever such a torture since life began! â€" to bear her on one's shoulders, biting, wriggling, raving, scratching, unwholesome, powdered, insane, yet sane to the point of insanity, reading his letters, thrusting herself on us, coming in wavering trembling ... This bag of ferrets is what Tom [Eliot] wears round his neck.
As the medical bills rose, so did her family's resentment of her. Her brother, Maurice, blamed her for what he saw as his second-rate education, because there was no money left to send him to public school. She became engaged to a schoolteacher, Charles Buckle, in 1914, but Buckle's mother was apparently unhappy about it. Haigh-Wood's health problems persuaded Rose Haigh-Wood that her daughter was suffering from "moral insanity." She decided that Haigh-Wood should not marry or bear children, and withdrew the family's consent to the marriage.
Relationship with T. S. Eliot
First meeting
Haigh-Wood met Tom Eliot in or around March 1914 at a dance in London, where he took tea with her and a friend. They met again shortly after that at a lunch party in Scofield Thayer's rooms at Magdalen College, Oxford. Eliot and Thayer, both from privileged New England backgrounds, had been at Harvard together, where Eliot had studied philosophy, and both had arrived in Oxford on scholarships.
According to another friend of Eliot's, Sacheverell Sitwell, Eliot had noticed Haigh-Wood earlier, punting on the River Cherwell. Seymour-Jones writes that Oxford attracted young women visitors, or "river girls," who would come in search of eligible husbands; women were not allowed to take degrees at Oxford until 1920.
Lyndall Gordon writes that Eliot was jolted to life by Haigh-Wood. He was a repressed, shy, 26-year-old who was bored in Oxford, writing of it that it was very pretty, "but I don't like to be dead." She was flamboyant, a great dancer, spoke her mind, smoked in public, dressed in bold colours and looked like an actress. Impressed by her apparently wealthy background, the artist father and the brother at Sandhurst, he failed to realise that, within the rigid English class system, Haigh-Wood was no match for his New England background or for the English aristocrats with whom he had surrounded himself. A few of his friends, including Aldous Huxley, said they liked Haigh-Wood precisely because she was vulgar. For her part, she fell in love with Eliot, seeing in him what she described as "the call to the wild that is in men."
Marriage
Eliot was in Oxford for one year only, and was expected to return to Harvard to begin a career as an academic philosopher, an idea he railed against. He wanted to be a poet. He had completed The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock in 1911, the poem that was to make his name when it was published in Chicago in 1915, and he saw remaining in England as a way to escape his parents' plans for him. When he was in his 60s, Eliot wrote that he was immature and timid at the time, and was probably in love with Emily Hale, a Bostonian he had had a relationship with in the United States. What he wanted from Haigh-Wood, he said, was a flirtation. But a meeting with the American poet Ezra Pound had persuaded him that the pursuit of poetry was possible, and marrying Haigh-Wood meant he could stay in England and avoid Harvard. Eliot told a friend, Conrad Aiken, that he wanted to marry and lose his virginity.
The couple were married after three months, on 26 June 1915, at Hampstead Register Office in London, with Lucy Ely Thayer (Scofield's sister) and Haigh-Wood's aunt, Lillia C. Symes, as witnesses. Eliot signed "no occupation" on the certificate and described his father as a brick manufacturer. Neither of them told their parents.
Separation
Eliot arranged for a formal separation in February 1933 and thereafter shunned Haigh-Wood entirely, hiding from her and instructing his friends not to tell her where he was. She could not accept the end of the relationship. Her efforts to find him appeared to his friends to confirm that she was mentally ill.
The last time she saw him was on 18 November 1935 at a Sunday Times Book Fair in Regent Street, London, where he was giving a talk. Carrying her dog, Polly, and three of his books, she arrived in clothes she had started wearing to performances of his plays: a British Union of Fascists uniform, black beret and black cape. She wrote in her diary:
I turned a face to him of such joy that no-one in that great crowd could have had one moment's doubt. I just said, Oh Tom, & he seized my hand, & said how do you do, in quite a loud voice. He walked straight on to the platform then & gave a most remarkably clever, well thought out lecture. . . . I stood the whole time, holding Polly up high in my arms. Polly was very excited & wild. I kept my eyes on Tom's face the whole time, & I kept nodding my head at him, & making encouraging signs. He looked a little older, more mature & smart, much thinner & not well or robust or rumbustious at all. No sign of a woman's care about him. No cosy evenings with dogs and gramophones I should say.
As he signed copies of the books for her, she asked him, "Will you come back with me?" and he replied, "I cannot talk to you now," then left with someone else.
Eliot's attitude toward women
Carole Seymour-Jones, one of Haigh-Wood's biographers, argues that there was a strong streak of misogyny in the way Eliot regarded Haigh-Wood. He wrote to a friend that Haigh-Wood had "an original mind, and I consider not at all a feminine one." Louis Menand argues in The New Yorker that Eliot regarded women the way he regarded the Jews, seeing both as responsible for irrationality and romanticism. He was uneasy with female sexuality â€" which led Seymour-Jones to suspect he was gay â€" which manifested itself both in his poetry and in his attitude toward Haigh-Wood's body. Menand writes that Eliot's work is replete with oversexed women, whom he saw as modern succubae, such as Grishkin in his Whispers of Immortality (1919).
Writing
Haigh-Wood wrote several stories and reviews for The Criterion, the literary magazine Eliot founded, using the pseudonyms FM, Fanny Marlow, Feiron Morris, Felise Morrison, and Irene Fassett.