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Eliot, T.S. The Waste Land Facsimile: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts, Including the Annotations of Ezra Pound. Liveright: Norton. Nov. 2022. 200p. ed. by Valerie Eliot. ISBN 9781324093008. $40. LITERATURE

Gordon, Lyndall. The Hyacinth Girl: T.S. Eliot’s Hidden Muse. Norton. Nov. 2022. 384p. ISBN 9781324002802. $35. LITERATURE

Hollis, Matthew. The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem. Norton. Nov. 2022. 352p. ISBN 9780393240252. $30. LITERATURE

Norton celebrates the centenary of T.S. Eliot’s magisterial The Waste Land with three key titles. Thought lost until its 1968 acquisition by the New York Public Library, the original manuscript of the poem proved to be much longer than the standing version and was published in facsimile in 1971, as edited by Eliot’s widow, Valerie. The Waste Land Facsimile is a new edition including an appendix of recently discovered corrections she intended to make and an afterword by Faber poetry editor Matthew Hollis; it comes from the Norton imprint Liveright—especially appropriate as The Waste Land was first published in the United States by Boni & Liveright. Costa Biography winner Hollis also weighs in with The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem, which reconstructs the poem’s creation and shows how strife between the poet and Vivienne, his wife at the time, imbues the writing. In The Hyacinth Girl, Gordon (T.S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life) revisits the relationship between Eliot and Emily Hale, a drama teacher to whom he wrote more than 1,000 letters and who can be seen as the source of The Wasteland’s “memory and desire.”

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