While making it, I was struck by how many women are revealing new perspectives on Eliot today. The urgency their voices retained in my life, and my hunch that they seemed to be sidelined in critical studies, led me to explore them more deeply for a Radio 4 documentary, Hold on Tight: The Women of The Waste Land, to be broadcast later this week. They were a motley crew I had never expected to encounter in poetry, including a dreamy “hyacinth girl”, an anxious, manic woman whose “nerves were bad tonight”, gossipy, working-class women in pubs and a silent typist pacing around her flat, alone, after an assault. There are lots of women in this mix and they first sang to me at 17 with powerful appeal. Their lives were stirred together with references to mythology. In the poem, various narrators and characters take the reader through shifting landscapes and scenes: deserts, endless plains, rivers of oil and tar, ornate rooms, noisy pubs, the bridges and streets of an unreal city. Photograph: Princetown University Library An envelope addressed to Emily Hale, written by TS Eliot.
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