The Imperfect Life of T. S. Eliot

A nuanced, discerning account of a life famously flawed in its search for perfection

Balancing sympathy and judgement...Lyndall Gordon plumbs the gap separating Eliot's vision of an otherworldly Absolute from his decidedly terrestrial social views...No mere abridgement or revision of Lyndall Gordon's earlier two-volume biography, this work offers a wealth of new material and fresh insights

A fascinating portrait

A subtle portrait of Eliot as a Jamesian hero torn between memory and desire, worldly happiness and a more rarefied world of the spirit

Gordon manages to be definitive but not dogmatic, sympathetic without taking sides, doorstop thick without seeming too long. It horrifies and fascinates like re-runs of a train wreck

This complex spiritual and artistic history is reconstructed with tact, diligence, and subtlety

Among the very best of this century's biographers

A nuanced, discerning account of a life famously flawed in its search for perfection

Gordon is the rare modern day biographer who can resist the temptation to make clay feet into a synecdoche for a man. "I propose to look flaws in the face without seeing flaws alone," she says, and she succeeds brilliantly

What would [Eliot] have made of a woman with such profound insight and knowledge as Lyndall Gordon writing his biography, stripping him of his cloak of mysteriousness, and offering credible interpretations of his work?

Subtle and authoritative

The most valuable single book yet published about Eliot

A model of its kind: authoritative, meticulously documented, sensitive alike to poetic and spiritual nuances

An intellectually demanding, sophisticated and distinguished book . . . Probing and extremely thoughtful

With this hugely impressive study...Lyndall Gordon blew the door of T.S. Eliot's domesticity wide open...[H]er willingness to allow the poetry to go on working its magic while she stares, unflinching, into the face of the man who wrote it is an awesome achievement

Daring, strong and psychologically brilliant

The most valuable single book yet published about Eliot

An intellectually demanding, sophisticated and distinguished book . . . Probing and extremely thoughtful