(26 June 1915 - January 22, 1947) (her death)
They separated in 1933. In 1938 Vivienne was committed to a mental hospital, where she lived until her death in 1947. Eliot never visited her there.
Vivienne first met Tom Eliot in the spring of 1915 at a dance in a large hotel in London, where he took tea with her and a friend. They met again that March at a lunch party in Scofield Thayer's rooms at Magdalen College, Oxford. Eliot and Thayer, both from privileged New England backgrounds, had been at Harvard together, where Eliot had studied philosophy, and both had arrived in Oxford on scholarships. According to another friend of Eliot's, Sacheverell Sitwell, Eliot had spotted Vivienne earlier, punting on the River Cherwell, which runs through Oxford. Seymour-Jones writes that Oxford attracted young women visitors, or "river girls," who would come in search of eligible husbands—women were not allowed to take degrees at Oxford until 1920—and although the town was somewhat empty of British men in 1914 because of the war, a number of American students had arrived to fill the gap.
Lyndall Gordon writes that Eliot was jolted to life by Vivienne. He was a repressed, shy, 26-year-old who was bored in Oxford, writing of it that it was very pretty, "but I don't like to be dead." She was flamboyant, a great dancer, spoke her mind, smoked in public, dressed in bold colours, and looked like an actress; not the kind of woman, Gordon writes, that a young gentleman of the time could introduce to his mother. Impressed by her apparently wealthy background, the artist father, and the brother at Sandhurst, he failed to realize that, within the rigid English class system, Vivienne was no match for his New England background or for the English aristocrats he was surrounded by— although a few of them, including Aldous Huxley, said they liked her precisely because she was vulgar. For her part, she fell instantly in love with Eliot, seeing in him what she described as "the call to the wild that is in men.
Eliot was in Oxford for one year only, and was expected to return to Harvard to begin a career as an academic philosopher, an idea he railed against. He wanted to be a poet. He had already completed The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock in 1911, the poem that was to make his name when it was published in Chicago in 1915, and he saw remaining in England as a way to escape his parents' plans for him. When he was in his 60s, Eliot wrote that he was immature and timid at the time, and was probably in love with Emily Hale, a Bostonian he had had a relationship with back in the U.S.; he wrote her 1,000 letters over the course of his life, letters that his estate has so far not allowed to be published. What he really wanted from Vivienne, he said, was a flirtation. But a meeting with the American poet, Ezra Pound, had persuaded him that the pursuit of poetry was possible, and in Eliot's mind marrying Vivienne became part of that, in that it meant he could stay in England and avoid philosophy at Harvard. "'I came to persuade myself that I was in love with her," he wrote, "simply because I wanted to burn my boats and commit myself to staying in England."
The couple were married after three months, on 26 June 1915, at Hampstead Register Office in London, with Lucy Ely Thayer, Scofield's sister with whom Vivienne had become close, and Vivienne's aunt, Lillia C. Symes, as witnesses. Eliot signed himself as of "no occupation," and described his father as a brick manufacturer. Neither of them told their parents. Cyril Connolly, the writer, spread a story that Vivienne had seduced Eliot in a punt, and that he had felt obliged to marry her—the "awful daring of a moment's surrender/Which an age of prudence can never retract" that Eliot writes of in The Waste Land—though James Edwin Miller argues that it was unlikely either would have felt that sex had compromised Vivienne, because she had already had at least one affair. In any event Eliot told a friend, Conrad Aiken, that he wanted to marry and lose his virginity.
Eliot arranged for a formal separation in February 1933, and shunned her entirely, hiding from her and instructing his friends—including members of the Bloomsbury Group and the publisher Faber & Faber, where he was a director—not to tell her where he was. Vivienne could not accept the end of the relationship. She became panicky and depressed, her frantic attempts to reach out to him appearing to confirm that she was mentally ill. Virginia Woolf, a friend of Eliot's, called her a "bag of ferrets" that he wore around his neck.
She finally caught up with him on 18 November 1935 at a Sunday Times Book Fair in Regent Street, London, where he was giving a talk. Carrying her dog, Polly, and three of his books, she arrived in clothes she had started wearing to performances of his plays: a British Union of Fascists uniform, a black beret, and a black cape. As he signed copies of the books for her, she asked him, "Will you come back with me?" and he replied, "I cannot talk to you now," then left. It was the last she saw of him.
Eliot's attitude toward women
Carole Seymour-Jones, one of Vivienne's biographers, believes there was a strong streak of misogyny in the way Eliot regarded Vivienne. Eliot once wrote to a friend that she had an original mind, but "not at all a feminine one." Louis Menand argues in The New Yorker that Eliot regarded women the way he regarded the Jews, seeing both as responsible for irrationality and romanticism. He had an additional horror of female sexuality—which led Seymour-Jones to suspect he was gay—a horror manifested both in his poetry and in his attitude toward Vivienne's body and the monthly battles with her out-of-control menstruation. Menand writes that Eliot's work is replete with oversexed women, whom he saw as modern succubae, such as Grishkin in Whispers of Immortality: