Emily Hale (27 October 1891 – 12 October 1969) [3] 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.[4][5] Per Hale's instructions, the letters were opened on January 2, 2020. 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 Hale letters were opened, Harvard's Houghton Library issued an unexpected statement that Eliot had prepared in 1960, to be opened when Hale's archives were released.[6] Princeton then released Hale's summary of their relationship.[7]
Hale was born in East Orange, New Jersey, on 27 October 1891.[3][8][9] Her father was the Reverend Edward Hale, an architect who became a Unitarian Minister and taught at Harvard Divinity School.[8] Her mother Emily (née Milliken) had become a "permanent mental invalid" after the death of her infant son,[10] 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 Hale frequently traveled with them to Europe. The three of them spent many summers in Chipping Campden, England, in the 1930s, and hosted Eliot while they vacationed there.[10][11][12]
Hale graduated from Miss Porter's School,[3] but never attended college. After her father died in 1918, she took a job at a dorm matron at Simmons University (then College), where she had helped organize the drama club as a volunteer in 1916. She later was promoted to speech instructior at Simmons. She went on to serve as a speech and drama teacher at Milwaukee-Downer College (1921–1929) (now part of Lawrence University), Scripps College (1932–1934),[8][5] and Smith College (1936–1942), as well as the all-girls Concord Academy and Abbot Academy preparatory schools at the end of her teaching career.[1][3][5][8]
Hale was an active member of the Unitarian Church and also the League of Women Voters, and she was a volunteer at the Sophia Smith Collection.[3]
Eliot recalled first falling in love with Hale in 1912 when he was a graduate student studying philosophy at Harvard,[13] and Eliot declared his love for her shortly before leaving for Europe in 1914;[14] Eliot later said that 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 Hale did not materially resume until 1930. From 1930 until 1956, Eliot wrote over a thousand letters to Hale [15] visiting her in California over the New Year's holidays in 1932-33 before deciding to seek a formal separation from his wife when he returned to England in 1933.[11] However he told Hale he could not seek a divorce because of the strictures of his Anglican faith.[6]
Hale and Eliot spent the summers from 1935 to 1939 together in Campden, Gloucestershire, as the guests of her aunt and uncle, the Perkinses.[16][12][11] In 1935, Hale and Eliot visited Burnt Norton, an abandoned manor house in Gloucestershire. (Eliot biographers had believed this visit occurred in 1934, but the Eliot-Hale correspondence revealed that the visit occurred in 1935.) In a memoir released by Princeton Library in mid-January 2020, Hale said that Eliot had told her that "Burnt Norton" was his love poem to her, an assertion backed up in the Eliot letters themselves.[17]