Esmé Valerie Eliot (née Fletcher; 17 August 19269 November 2012) was the second wife and later widow of the Nobel Prize-winning poet T. S. Eliot. She was a major shareholder in the publishing firm of Faber and Faber Limited and the editor and annotator of a number of books dealing with her late husband's writings.
Early life
The daughter of an insurance manager in Leeds, she was educated at Queen Anne's School, Caversham, where she was reputed to have told her headteacher that she knew precisely what she wanted to become: secretary to T. S. Eliot.
Personal life
Valerie married Eliot, almost 40 years her senior, on 10 January 1957. She had been an admirer of Eliot since, at the age of 14, hearing John Gielgud read Journey of the Magi, as she confided to the novelist Charles Morgan, for whom she worked as a secretary. Morgan used his influence to get her a job at Faber and Faber, where she finally met Eliot in August 1949, a debt of kindness which she always acknowledged. They moved to No.3 Kensington Court Gardens where she lived until her death.
In a 1994 interview with The Independent, she recalled a very ordinary life of evenings spent at home playing Scrabble and eating cheese, stating "He obviously needed a happy marriage. He wouldn't die until he'd had it."
One of Valerie Eliot's most lucrative decisions as executor was granting permission for a stage musical to be based on her husband's work Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats. This became the hit Andrew Lloyd Webber musical Cats. – and funded the T. S. Eliot Prize, given annually and worth £15,000. She was 86 years old.
She was a godparent to the mathematician Marcus du Sautoy.
See also
- Karen Christensen