Click on a thumbnail to go to Google Books.
|
Loading... A New England Affairby Steven Carroll
None No current Talk conversations about this book.  anzlitlovers | Nov 24, 2017 |  no reviews | add a review
Belongs to SeriesThe Eliot Quartet (book 3)
1965. The great poet, TS Eliot, is dead. Hearing the news, the seventy-two year old Emily Hale points her Ford Roadster towards the port of Gloucester, where a fishing boat will take her out to sea, near the low, treacherous rocks called the Dry Salvages, just off Cape Ann, Massachusetts. Over the course of that day, clutching a satchel of letters, Emily Hale slips between past and present, reliving her life with Eliot - starting with that night in 1913, the moment when her life turned, when the young Tom Eliot and Emily Hale fell deeply in love with each other. But Tom moved to London to fulfil his destiny as the famous poet `TS Eliot', and Emily went on to become his muse - the silent figure behind some of the greatest poetry of the 20th century - his friend and his confidante. But never did she become his lover or his wife. From Steven Carroll, one of our most brilliant, award-winning authors, A New England Affair is the third novel in his acclaimed Eliot Quartet, a companion novel to The Lost Life and A World of Other People. It is a deeply moving, intense and poignant novel of a love that never finds the right moment, and so becomes the ghost of what could have been, of what never quite was, and never quite will be. No library descriptions found. |
Current DiscussionsNonePopular covers 
 Google Books — Loading...RatingAverage: (3.38)
Is this you?Become a LibraryThing Author. |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Wikipedia in English
1
Emily Hale, muse to TS Eliot but never his wife or lover, returns in this, the third book of Steven Carroll’s Eliot Quartet. Reminiscent of Mrs Dalloway, the story takes place on a single day in 1965, as Emily – now aged 74 and in extremis after learning of Eliot’s death – mulls over the tragedy of her life. On a fishing boat heading for treacherous rocks Emily slides between past and present, reliving the scenes of her wasted life, while the reader wonders what’s inside the satchel that she clutches and what she plans to do.
It’s a small tragedy as tragedies go, but it’s real nonetheless. The couple fell in love in 1913, in New England, and with exquisite tact Carroll depicts Emily’s memory of the moment when both realised that their destiny lay with each other but they failed to say what they were really feeling. The moment passed and Eliot set off for what was meant to be a year of study overseas but became a new life in London. He achieved prestige and fame as a great poet, but he also made a hasty marriage which he regretted, as depicted in The Lost Life.
Emily transcended this betrayal and they maintained a relationship through letters and her regular trips across the Atlantic, but she never became his lover. As she relives this time in her life she is convinced that all his poems contain coded allusions to their love, and she rationalises the way she was always kept secret except with a very small circle of his friends. But she’s no fool really: she knew only too well that Virginia Woolf despised her and that the Bloomsbury set would never really accept Eliot as the Englishman he yearned to be.
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2017/11/24/a-new-england-affair-by-steven-carroll/ (