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Vivienne Haigh-Wood Eliot

Vivienne Haigh-Wood Eliot (28 May 1888 – 22 January 1947) was an English governess and writer who became the first wife of the American poet T. S. Eliot (1888–1965). 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 – ostensibly after a heart attack, though there is a suspicion that she took an overdose – 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."