Not as we have been told …

… The Fall of a Sparrow by Ann Pasternak Slater, review — in defence of TS Eliot’s maligned wife, Vivien. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

This book is a forensic and often ruthless — Eliot biographers are quoted mainly to be dismissed as rank fabulists — attempt to understand Vivien. It is the first time so much light has been thrown on this troubled character. Everybody has heard of Eliot’s “problem” wife, but few have tried to understand her in this depth and with such sympathetic insight into her impact on Eliot’s greatest poetry.