THE WOMEN COME AND GO.(author T.S. Eliot's sexual relationships; book Painted Shadow: The Life of Vivienne Eliot, First Wife of T.S. Eliot, and the Long-Suppressed Truth about Her Influence on His Genius)

T. S. Eliot's sex life. Do we really want to go there? It is a sad and desolate place. Eliot was twenty-six and, almost certainly, a frustrated virgin when, in 1915, he married Vivienne Haigh-Wood, an Englishwoman he had known for three months. Haigh-Wood was a medically and emotionally vexed person. Her troubles included irregular and frequent menstruation, migraines, neuralgia, panic attacks, and, eventually, addiction to her medication, particularly to ether. She was pretty, ambitious, and (on her better days) vivacious. Eliot was handsome, ambitious, and the opposite of vivacious. "Exquisite and listless," Bertrand Russell described him when he met the Eliots for ...