Valerie Eliot Dies; Poet T.S. Eliot's Widow Dead At 86
Valerie Eliot, the wife and widow of famed poet T.S. Eliot, died on Friday at her London home at the age of 86.
A statement was released on Sunday from the Eliot estate that said she succumbed to a short illness.
Eliot was born Valerie Fletcher on Aug. 17, 1926, in Leeds, England. She met T.S. Elliot working at Faber & Faber where she was a young secretary for the London-based publishing company and he was a director. Valerie was the second wife of the American Nobel laureate and almost 40 years younger than her husband.
The couple married in 1957 and reportedly had a very happy marriage despite friends' reservations about their age difference. One of Mrs. Eliot's major jobs was editing her husband's letters, which she compiled into volumes, according to The New York Times.
"Valerie Eliot has been editing her late husband's correspondence for three decades," said Karen Christiansen, who worked for Valerie on the first and only volume published, written in 2005. "When I worked for her, I often wondered if she would be able to let go of any of the letters and was breathless with relief when the first volume went off."
Christiansen also oversaw the publication of T.S. Eliot's facsimile edition of "The Waste Land," which is considered a masterpiece of modern poetry.
When her husband died in 1965, Valerie became the executor of his estate and did not cooperate with any biographers about T.S. Elliot as per his last wishes. However, she allowed a musical to be made based on verses from her husband's "Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats," which became the Andrew Lloyd Webber hit musical "Cats."
Valeries used the money from "Cats" to start the Old Possum's Practical Trust literary charity and the annual T.S. Eliot Prize for poetry.
