New England Affair is a melancholy book, but it’s beautiful.
Emily Hale, muse to TS Eliot but never his wife or lover, returns in this, the third book of Steven Carroll’s Eliot Quartet. Reminiscent of Mrs Dalloway, the story takes place on a single day in 1965, as Emily – now aged 74 and in extremis after learning of Eliot’s death – mulls over the tragedy of her life. On a fishing boat heading for treacherous rocks Emily slides between past and present, reliving the scenes of her wasted life, while the reader wonders what’s inside the satchel that she clutches and what she plans to do.
It’s a small tragedy as tragedies go, but it’s real nonetheless. The couple fell in love in 1913, in New England, and with exquisite tact Carroll depicts Emily’s memory of the moment when both realised that their destiny lay with each other but they failed to say what they were really feeling. The moment passed and Eliot set off for what was meant to be a year of study overseas but became a new life in London. He achieved prestige and fame as a great poet, but he also made a hasty marriage which he regretted, as depicted in The Lost Life.
Emily transcended this betrayal and they maintained a relationship through letters and her regular trips across the Atlantic, but she never became his lover. As she relives this time in her life she is convinced that all his poems contain coded allusions to their love, and she rationalises the way she was always kept secret except with a very small circle of his friends. But she’s no fool really: she knew only too well that Virginia Woolf despised her and that the Bloomsbury set would never really accept Eliot as the Englishman he yearned to be.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2017/11/24/a-new-england-affair-by-steven-carroll/ ( )