(Esme) Valerie Eliot (née Fletcher) (1926-2012), Second wife of Thomas Stearns ('T.S.') Eliot

Sitter in 5 portraits
Valerie Eliot is the widow and second wife of the Nobel prize-winning poet Thomas Eliot. She married Eliot, thirty-seven years her senior, in 1957. She is his most important editor and literary executor, having published The Waste Land: Facsimile and Manuscripts of the Original Drafts (1971) and The Letters of T.S. Eliot: Volume 1, 1898-1922 (1989). She also assisted Christopher Ricks with his edition of The Inventions of the March Hare (1996), a volume of Eliot's unpublished verse. She donates the £15,000 annual prize money for the T.S. Eliot Prize.