(Esme) Valerie Eliot (née Fletcher)
(1926-2012), Second wife of Thomas Stearns ('T.S.') EliotSitter in 5 portraits
Valerie Eliot was the widow and second wife of the Nobel prize-winning poet Thomas Eliot. She married Eliot, thirty-seven years her senior, in 1957. She was 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 She also assisted Christopher Ricks with his edition of The Inventions of the March Hare (1996), a volume of Eliot's unpublished verse.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 donated the £15,000 annual prize money for the T.S. Eliot Prize.
T.S. Eliot; (Esme) Valerie Eliot (née Fletcher)
by Angus McBean
bromide print, 1957
NPG P891
(Esme) Valerie Eliot (née Fletcher); T.S. Eliot
by Ida Kar
vintage bromide print, 1959
NPG x88542
by Mark Gerson
modern bromide print, 23 June 1960
NPG x88203
(Esme) Valerie Eliot (née Fletcher); Andrew Lloyd Webber, Baron Lloyd Webber
by Keystone Press Agency Ltd
bromide press print, September 1980
NPG x184043
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