The Silenced Muse: Emily Hale, T.S. Eliot, and the Role of a Lifetime, with Sara Fitzgerald
01/26/25 • 87 min
In this episode, Sara Fitzgerald joins us to discuss her new book The Silenced Muse: Emily Hale, T.S. Eliot, and the Role of a Lifetime. It is the first book-length biography of Emily Hale, the longtime love and secret creative muse of poet T.S. Eliot, who wrote Emily Hale over 1100 letters over the decades of their complicated relationship. However, their relationship was mostly forgotten by history after their letters were locked away for 50 years after their deaths, to protect the innocent. By the time the archive was opened in January 2020, few scholars understood the depth of their relationship. This book reestablishes Hale, not only as a major influence on T.S. Eliot’s body of work, but also as her own woman. From Hale’s upbringing in Chestnut Hill to their first flirtation in a Harvard Square parlor, Fitzgerald traces the intertwining lives of Hale and Eliot over a half a century that revolves around the intellectual center of gravity that is Boston.
Full show notes: http://HUBhistory.com/319/
Support us: http://patreon.com/HUBhistory/
The Silenced Muse: Emily Hale, T.S. Eliot, and the Role of a Lifetime, with Sara Fitzgerald
Sara Fitzgerald is a retired journalist, having written for The St. Petersburg Times, The Miami Herald, and the Akron Beacon-Journal. She was at The Washington Post for 15 years, where she edited the very first online edition in 1980. She started writing poems and novels as a sideline while working as journalist, and her first work of nonfiction was a biography of Elly Peterson, one of the only women with a national political reputation in mid-20th-century America. Just before T.S. Eliot’s letters to Emily Hale were opened in January 2020, she published a book of historic fiction about the pair called The Poet’s Girl, and her ongoing research in the archives resulted in this biography.
- Purchase The Silenced Muse: Emily Hale, T.S. Eliot, and the Role of a Lifetime
- Sara Fitzgerald’s author website
- Walk in Emily Hale’s footsteps with Sara’s photo gallery of sites connected to her life
- Find out more about the 1918 flu epidemic or the Boston Cooking School in these classic podcast episodes
More to listen to
- Listen to your humble host Jake talk about landmaking in Boston on Explain Boston to Me
- Learn more about The Mega Awesome Super Huge Wicked Fun Podcast Playdate and get your tickets for a live taping of The Past and the Curious
In this episode, Sara Fitzgerald joins us to discuss her new book The Silenced Muse: Emily Hale, T.S. Eliot, and the Role of a Lifetime. It is the first book-length biography of Emily Hale, the longtime love and secret creative muse of poet T.S. Eliot, who wrote Emily Hale over 1100 letters over the decades of their complicated relationship. However, their relationship was mostly forgotten by history after their letters were locked away for 50 years after their deaths, to protect the innocent. By the time the archive was opened in January 2020, few scholars understood the depth of their relationship. This book reestablishes Hale, not only as a major influence on T.S. Eliot’s body of work, but also as her own woman. From Hale’s upbringing in Chestnut Hill to their first flirtation in a Harvard Square parlor, Fitzgerald traces the intertwining lives of Hale and Eliot over a half a century that revolves around the intellectual center of gravity that is Boston.
Full show notes: http://HUBhistory.com/319/
Support us: http://patreon.com/HUBhistory/
The Silenced Muse: Emily Hale, T.S. Eliot, and the Role of a Lifetime, with Sara Fitzgerald
Sara Fitzgerald is a retired journalist, having written for The St. Petersburg Times, The Miami Herald, and the Akron Beacon-Journal. She was at The Washington Post for 15 years, where she edited the very first online edition in 1980. She started writing poems and novels as a sideline while working as journalist, and her first work of nonfiction was a biography of Elly Peterson, one of the only women with a national political reputation in mid-20th-century America. Just before T.S. Eliot’s letters to Emily Hale were opened in January 2020, she published a book of historic fiction about the pair called The Poet’s Girl, and her ongoing research in the archives resulted in this biography.
- Purchase The Silenced Muse: Emily Hale, T.S. Eliot, and the Role of a Lifetime
- Sara Fitzgerald’s author website
- Walk in Emily Hale’s footsteps with Sara’s photo gallery of sites connected to her life
- Find out more about the 1918 flu epidemic or the Boston Cooking School in these classic podcast episodes
More to listen to
- Listen to your humble host Jake talk about landmaking in Boston on Explain Boston to Me
- Learn more about The Mega Awesome Super Huge Wicked Fun Podcast Playdate and get your tickets for a live taping of The Past and the Curious
Previous Episode
Beastly Boston
Lions and tigers and bears, oh my! This week, we’re talking about Boston’s first encounters with exotic animals. I will be talking about the very first lion to make an appearance in Boston, but instead of tigers and bears, we’ll take a look at Boston’s experiences with elephants and alligators. Our story will span almost 200 years, with the first lion being imported in the early 1700s, the first elephant in the late 1700s, and the first alligators that most Bostonians got acquainted with were installed in the Public Garden in 1901. Can you imagine proper late-Victorian Bostonians crowding around a pool of alligators to watch them tear live animals limb from limb? I couldn’t either before digging into this week’s episode.
Full show notes: http://HUBhistory.com/318/
Support us: http://patreon.com/HUBhistory/
Beastly Boston
Image from the handbill advertising the first elephant in 1796 A newspaper ad to see the elephant Sally Gool Putnam’s sketch of elephants in 1860 Alligators at the Public Garden in 1901- “The Last Voyage of the Province Galley,” by Robert E. Moody read at the April 1934 meeting of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts
- HARDESTY, JARED ROSS. “‘The Negro at the Gate’: Enslaved Labor in Eighteenth-Century Boston.” The New England Quarterly, vol. 87, no. 1, 2014
- “The Crowninshield Elephant: The surprising story of Old Bet, the first elephant ever to be brought to America,” by George G. Goodwin
- Goodwin, G. G. “The First Living Elephant in America.” Journal of Mammalogy, vol. 6, no. 4, 1925
- Sally Gool Putnam sees elephants at the Aquarial Gardens
- Park, Lawrence, 1873-1924. Major Thomas Savage of Boston And His Descendants. Boston: Press of D. Clapp & Son, 1914
- “The People in the Pews: Capt. Arthur Savage,” by Mark Hurwitz
- The diary of William Bentley, D.D., pastor of the East Church, Salem, Massachusetts, volume 2
- Vail, RWG, “Random Notes on the History of the Early American Circus,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, April 1933
- Diary of Charles Francis Adams, volume 6, April 13, 1836
- Paywalled newspapers
- The Recorder, Thu, May 19, 1796: First elephant arrives in NYC
- The Recorder, Tue, Aug 06, 1816: Old Bet shot in Maine
- The Vermont Journal, Mon, Aug 05, 1816: Old Bet shot in Maine
- The Vermont Watchman, Tue, Aug 20, 1816: Old Bet’s killer identified
- The New York Evening Post, Tue, May 29, 1804: Second elephant for sale
- The Boston Globe, Sat, Oct 12, 1901: Gator roundup
- Boston Post, Fri, Aug 09, 1901: vivid description of live gator feedings, complaints, header image
- Boston Evening Transcript, Sat, Aug 10, 1901: Alligator care instructions
- Boston Evening Transcript, Sat, Aug 03, 1901: Searching for alligators amongst the lillies
- Boston Post, Thu, Sep 19, 1901: Gators to the Franklin Park greenhouse
- Boston Post, Sat, Aug 10, 1901: No more live feedings
- Boston Evening Transcript, Sat, Apr 13, 1901: “Freak...
Next Episode
Martin Luther King’s Boston, with Dr. Imari Paris Jeffries
This week, Dr. Imari Paris Jeffries joins us to talk about the years when Martin Luther King, Jr lived in Boston. As you’ll hear him say in just a few minutes, Dr. King is a figure that most of us only imagine as a grainy newsreel image or a voice crackling on an old recording, so it can be hard to imagine Dr. King as flesh and blood. With Dr. Paris Jeffries help, we’re going to imagine the Boston that Reverend King experienced: where he studied, where he fell in love with Coretta Scott, and where he would return over a decade later, when he had already become a legend in his own time. Full show notes: http://HUBhistory.com/320/ Support us: http://patreon.com/HUBhistory/
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