End of a dry season

The Letters of T.S.Eliot is a project which already seems to belong to another world, of leisure and detailed scholarship. It was conceived of decades ago, and the first volume, under the editorship of Eliot’s widow Valerie, came out in 1988. A second volume, with the support of the excellent John Haffenden, emerged 21 years later; this third takes us only up to 1927, with a good 40 years of a busy professional life to follow. There may be a dozen volumes to go, and the undertaking in the end will rival the great Pilgrim edition of Dickens’s letters in scale.

The editing of the Eliot letters is exemplary in its detail, authority and quality of annotation. It is the closest thing to a perfect edition of a great writer’s correspondence that can be imagined. There are few collected literary correspondences of this quality now emerging in English.