Valerie Eliot née Esmé Valerie Fletcher (born 17 August 1926) is the surviving widow and second wife of the Nobel prize

Nobel Prize

The Nobel Prizes are annual international awards bestowed by Scandinavian committees in recognition of cultural and scientific advances. The will of the Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, established the prizes in 1895...

-winning poet, T. S. Eliot

T. S. Eliot

Thomas Stearns "T. S." Eliot OM was a playwright, literary critic, and arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century. Although he was born an American he moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 and was naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39.The poem that made his...

. She is a major stockholder in the publishing firm of Faber and Faber

Faber and Faber

Faber and Faber Limited, often abbreviated to Faber, is an independent publishing house in the UK, notable in particular for publishing a great deal of poetry and for its former editor T. S. Eliot. Faber has a rich tradition of publishing a wide range of fiction, non fiction, drama, film and music...

 Limited and the editor and annotator of a number of books dealing with her late husband's writings.

Life

Valerie married Eliot, almost 38 years her senior, on 10 January 1957. She is his most important editor and literary executor

Literary executor

A literary executor is a person with decision-making power in respect of a literary estate. According to Wills, Administration and Taxation: a practical guide "A will may appoint different executors to deal with different parts of the estate...

, having brought to press 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

Christopher Ricks

Sir Christopher Bruce Ricks, FBA is a British literary critic and scholar. He is the William M. and Sara B. Warren Professor of the Humanities at Boston University and Co-Director of the Editorial Institute at Boston University, and was Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford from 2004...

 with his edition of The Inventions of the March Hare (1996), a volume of Eliot's unpublished verse. A second volume of Eliot's letters, edited by Valerie, had been long-delayed, with much speculation but little solid information as to the reason. In late 2009, however, Volume 2 did come out.

She donates the £15,000 annual prize money for the T. S. Eliot Prize

T. S. Eliot Prize

The T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry is awarded by the Poetry Book Society to "the best collection of new verse in English first published in the UK or the Republic of Ireland" in any particular year. The Prize was inaugurated in 1993 in celebration of the Poetry Book Society's 40th birthday and in...

.

Memoir writers who were close companions of T. S. Eliot (such as Joseph Chiari and Herbert Read

Herbert Read

Sir Herbert Edward Read, DSO, MC was an English anarchist, poet, and critic of literature and art. He was one of the earliest English writers to take notice of existentialism, and was strongly influenced by proto-existentialist thinker Max Stirner....

) have said that Valerie had a rejuvenating effect on Eliot, whose first marriage to Vivienne Haigh-Wood Eliot

Vivienne Haigh-Wood Eliot

Vivienne Haigh-Wood Eliot was an English governess and writer who became notable as the first wife of the American poet, T.S. Eliot . Her legacy, and the extent to which she influenced Eliot's work, has been the subject of much debate...

was stormy. Vivienne died after being committed to an asylum. Valerie is credited with giving Eliot some of the happiest years of his life before his health declined. He died on 4 January 1965.

Further reading

• McCrum, Robert. "TS Eliot - the secret passion", The Observer.