A Conversation with Sara Fitzgerald, Author of The Silenced Muse

photo Credit: K. Kasmauski

I met Sara Fitzgerald, author of the book The Silenced Muse, through BIO (Biographers International Organization). In 2022, she hosted a fundraising dinner that brought together eight Washington-area biographers to talk about their current projects and writing in general. At the time, she was looking for a home for her book, and she found it several months later.

Recently, we exchanged emails so I could ask her more about her book’s subject, as well as tips about research and writing.

Q: For those who haven’t read your book yet, who was Emily Hale and why do you title it “the silenced muse”?

A: Emily Hale was an American woman, a talented amateur actress, and a speech and drama teacher who was the longtime secret love of the Nobel-Prize-winning poet T.S. Eliot. Over the course of their long relationship, Eliot wrote her more than 1,100 letters, a correspondence that was embargoed until 2020. I titled my book “The Silenced Muse” because Eliot acknowledged that after his second marriage, he arranged for virtually all of Hale’s side of the correspondence to be destroyed.

Q: How did you come to her story?

A: In college at the University of Michigan, I was a student of history, not English literature. For a long time, I’ve been a member of a women’s group that meets monthly to discuss a topic of the hostess’s choosing. Back in 2015, our hostess said she would like us to read and discuss one of her favorite poems, “Burnt Norton,”  the first of Eliot’s  “Four Quartets.” I was unfamiliar with the poem, so I turned to the Internet to read it and learn more about it.

The Wikipedia entry explained that Burnt Norton was an abandoned manor home in the Cotswolds of England that Eliot and Hale had visited in the mid-1930s. The entry also said that some thought Eliot would have married Hale if he had not been married to someone else. I knew something of Eliot’s two wives, but had never heard about Emily Hale. As I dug a little deeper, I learned about their extensive correspondence, and that it was scheduled to be opened within five years.

Q: You also wrote a novel about her life before you had full access to her papers [The Poet’s Girl, published in 2020]. . How did you make the mental adjustment to go from fiction to nonfiction? What did you learn that went against what you had imagined?

A: When I began working on my biography, I repeatedly had to ask myself, “Did I turn that up in my research or did I make it up?” Since I did not have to manage footnotes, it was sometimes hard to remember! When I wrote my novel, I had to fill in many gaps in the romantic relationship between Eliot and Hale. I tried, however, to hew as closely as I could to what was known about both of their lives. I wanted their interactions to be both possible and plausible, based on the known record.

Looking back, I can identify at least two major errors in my novel. Eliot later told Hale that he had fallen in love with her in 1913 when they had rehearsed a skit for a night of performances at the home of his cousin. Before he left Boston for a year’s study at Oxford, he told Hale he was in love with her. I had portrayed Hale as being immediately attracted to Eliot when they had met, and working to draw him out of his shell. But when the letters were opened, I learned that she was surprised and embarrassed when Eliot declared he was in love with her. I think she had been too busy pursuing her amateur theatrical interests to take note of his bumbling attempts at courtship. Still, she was interested in Eliot, and figured she would wait and see what happened when he returned from England. Instead he surprised his friends and family by impetuously marrying an Englishwoman. But Hale did not seem to pine away for Eliot in those early years, the way I depicted her in my novel.

The second major error was how I described what happened when they visited Burnt Norton. I tried to make it a very romantic, intimate encounter. It seems, however, that the outing inspired Eliot more than it did Hale. She was preoccupied with other concerns. Later, she remembered the nights they had spent in the garden behind the home where they were staying as the more memorable times. Although Eliot told her that “Burnt Norton” was his love poem to her, I think she was mystified that he considered it an expression of his love.

Q: On that note, can you talk your first encounter with these letters you had always heard about?

A: It was a day I will never forget. The Princeton University Library had announced it would make the letters available on a first-come, first-served basis on January 2, 2020. There were about six of us who showed up before the library opened, and I was fourth in line. Because of restrictions negotiated by the Eliot estate, we could not make copies of the letters; we had to transcribe whatever information we wanted to keep. I got the last spot at the three computers where the complete digital file of the letters could be accessed. It was exciting to dig in to them, alongside other Eliot scholars who had, in some cases, waited decades to read the letters.

Later in the morning, we were surprised to learn that in 1960 Eliot had sent the Harvard Library a secret letter, with instructions that it be opened the day that his letters to Hale became public. In this letter, he denied that he had ever loved her, and laid out a long list of complaints about her. It was hard to reconcile that letter with the earlier letters we were reading. While we concluded that Eliot wrote the letter in case his wife was still alive when the letters to Hale became public—she wasn’t—his letter only served to draw more attention to Hale’s letters. In the middle of the #metoo movement, most major U.S. news outlets wrote stories about the two versions of the love story.

Q: Early in their correspondence, Hale and Eliot were already discussing what would become of their letters. How do you think the fact that they knew others would read their letters affect what they wrote to each other?

A: Eliot urged Hale not to write to him as if someone else would be reading the letters. Since Eliot destroyed most of her side of the correspondence, we can’t judge whether she followed those instructions. But when Eliot first wrote about wanting to preserve the letters, as a sort of monument to his love for her, she seemed to express concern about sharing their most intimate thoughts. She suggested that they might want to ask trusted scholars to review the letters to preserve only those parts that would be of interest to fellow scholars of English literature. Actually,  because Eliot wrote so freely to Hale about so many things, I think scholars are finding everything in the letters to be very interesting.

In 1956, after their relationship changed and they became simply old friends, Eliot became concerned about how long the letters would be embargoed. He told Hale that he was not concerned about his expressions of love to her; rather, he was concerned about the nasty things he had said about many people, including friends and family members. His concerns seemed to have been exacerbated when he was able to read the correspondence of James Joyce on microfilm. At the time, Hale had no inkling that Eliot was planning to get married, and in retrospect, it appears that he did what he could to ensure that his much-younger second wife would never be able to see the letters.

Q: Hale had a tough time finding jobs that were satisfying and supported her. Where do you think she flourished the most?

A: Hale’s teaching career was hampered because she had never earned a college degree. She seemed happiest when she was acting and directing plays, and one of her longtime supervisors said that while she was a gifted teacher and director, she was a more talented director. Hale’s father died when she was 26 and her mother was institutionalized when she was 5. She had no surviving siblings. While she spent a good deal of time with an aunt and uncle, I think school drama clubs and theater groups provided her with the kind of close family she lacked for much of her life.

Q: What useful research advice did you get along the way (or maybe that you figured out yourself) that you can pass on to others?

A: Searchable online newspapers have become an invaluable resource, and new papers are continuing to be added to these data bases. Many are from small towns whose papers might otherwise be ignored. They opened up a lot of information to me about Hale’s theatrical and college careers. But there are still some geographical gaps in my research where the newspapers are not yet online. Because of my journalism background, I also tried to evaluate the nature of the newspaper stories and their accuracy. Did it read like a press release that was published verbatim? Was a theatrical review really written by a critic? Because Hale taught at schools and colleges, I also was able to review and search yearbooks and other school publications that are now available online.

The other resource I came to appreciate were the archivists and historians at libraries and museums—some of them working as volunteers. Big research libraries are often backlogged with requests, and that was particularly the case during the Covid pandemic, when I began doing additional research for my biography. But some of these people helped to research very specific questions for me. I think they liked to be asked, and to feel they are contributing to a project. I’m the kind of person who just likes to dig in and do it myself. I probably could have made even better use of some of these people if I had asked for more help at the start.

Q: What about tips for writing or re-writing?

A: I do a lot of editing of my work. I try to put space between my writing and my editing because I think slightly different parts of the brain are engaged in that task. It makes it easier to review what I have written with a more critical eye.

As I worked on my biography, I told myself I was going to try to capture everything that I turned up, in part because I was also spinning off essays for academic journals and knew that I might be able to use the information elsewhere, even if I did not keep it in my book. But by the time my manuscript was sold, it was twice as long as the length that had been proposed to the publisher. (And Emily Hale was never going to qualify for a biography the length of Sylvia Plath’s or Alexander Hamilton’s!) Trimming the manuscript at that point was very painful, and to a certain extent, I think it impacted the pacing of the book. I also realized that as I tried to emphasize the new factual material I had uncovered, I short-changed some of the “color” of my novel—i.e., extended descriptions of settings and key characters. With a bit more word count, I might have expanded on those kinds of elements.

While everyone wants her book to be a best-seller, my much more realistic goal is to become a footnote in someone else’s book!

Q: Anything else to add?

A: In the four books I have published since 2011, I have been attracted to the stories of women who led interesting and important lives, but are not well known. It has been very satisfying to research and write their stories, but it can also be a challenge to get them published and reviewed. I’m pleased that there are more secondary outlets (like the one you provide!) to help get these books in front of the reading public.

You can read more from Sara on her website. Purchase The Silenced Muse through Bookshop.org, Amazon, or other booksellers.