22 Facts About Emily Hale

Emily Hale was an American speech and drama teacher, who was the longtime muse and confidante of the poet T S Eliot.

Exactly 1,131 letters from Eliot to Hale were deposited in Princeton University Library in 1956 and were described as one of the best-known sealed archives in the world for many years.

Emily Hale had specified that the letters would be embargoed for fifty years after the latter of their deaths; the Princeton Library gave its staff a few more months to get them ready for the public to read.

The day the Emily Hale letters were opened, Harvard's Houghton Library issued an unexpected statement that Eliot had prepared in 1960, to be opened when Emily Hale's archives were released.

Emily Hale was born in East Orange, New Jersey, on 27 October 1891.

Emily Hale's father was the Reverend Edward Hale, an architect who became a Unitarian Minister and taught at Harvard Divinity School.

Emily Hale's mother Emily had become a "permanent mental invalid" after the death of her infant son, While some early Eliot biographers wrote that Hale was an orphan who was raised by her aunt and uncle, Edith and John Carroll Perkins, she lived at home with her father in Chestnut Hill, outside of Boston, until he died when she was 26.

The Perkinses later moved from Seattle to Boston, and Emily Hale frequently traveled with them to Europe.

Emily Hale graduated from Miss Porter's School, but never attended college.

Emily Hale later was promoted to speech instructior at Simmons.

Emily Hale went on to serve as a speech and drama teacher at Milwaukee-Downer College, Scripps College, and Smith College, as well as the all-girls Concord Academy and Abbot Academy preparatory schools at the end of her teaching career.

Emily Hale was an active member of the Unitarian Church and the League of Women Voters, and she was a volunteer at the Sophia Smith Collection.

Eliot recalled first falling in love with Emily Hale in 1912 when he was a graduate student studying philosophy at Harvard, and Eliot declared his love for her shortly before leaving for Europe in 1914; Eliot later said that Emily Hale did not reciprocate his feelings, but he continued to write her and to send her flowers for her theatrical performances after he left.

However, in June 1915, Eliot married Vivienne Haigh-Wood, and his preserved correspondence with Emily Hale did not materially resume until 1930.

Eliot's relationship with Emily Hale was said by some biographers to provide Eliot with a model of a silent, ethereal woman and chaste love that could be indefinitely sustained.

In 1957, after Eliot remarried, Emily Hale was forced to retire from Abbot Academy because she had reached the school's mandatory retirement age.

Emily Hale taught for a period at Oak Grove School in Vassalboro, Maine, and finally died in Concord, Massachusetts.

Emily Hale was a friend of the Princeton University English professor, Willard Thorp, and his wife Margaret Farrand Thorp.

Emily Hale specified that the letters should be kept closed for fifty full years after the latter of her or Eliot's death.

Emily Hale died after Eliot, on 12 October 1969 in Concord, and accordingly, the archive was opened to scholars only in January 2020, revealing 1,131 letters from Eliot to Emily Hale dating from the period 1930 to 1957.

Emily Hale included a cover note with the letters saying, "The memory of the years when we were most together and so happy are mine always", and, "I accepted conditions as they were offered under the unnatural code which surrounded us, so that perhaps more sophisticated persons than I will not be surprised to learn the truth about us".

Emily Hale highlighted passages of works that Eliot told Hale she had inspired, including The Waste Land.