While they may have known each other as teenagers, it was not until Eliot’s graduate school days at Harvard that he took an interest in Hale. Although some Eliot biographers described her as an orphan who was raised by her aunt and uncle, it appears she spent most of her childhood in the Boston area, living with her father. She attended the Berkeley Street School in Cambridge with Eleanor and other young women who became friends with Eliot, and then went on to attend Miss Porter’s School in Farmington, Connecticut. Hale was the daughter and niece of Unitarian clergymen, and her father had taught at Harvard Divinity School. He was seventeen and she was then fourteen, a childhood friend of his cousin Eleanor Hinkley. In his letters, Eliot recalled making Hale’s acquaintance in 1905, when he arrived in Boston to attend Milton Academy.
While Hale continued to be involved with theater for most of her life, the paper will focus on the experience she brought to the table when Eliot turned his attention to playwriting in the early 1930s. It also draws on the author’s research into Hale’s life, including accounts from newspapers and from the archives of colleges where she taught speech and drama. This paper is based on reading many, but not all, of the letters Eliot sent Hale between 19. In addition, she worked with celebrated set designers and took the art of set design very seriously herself. She performed with some of the oldest little theater companies in America, and some of the best of her time. She worked with actors and actresses who had already performed on the Broadway and London stages or who would work there or in Hollywood later in their careers. She was the niece of the man who was Boston’s preeminent music and drama critic in the first third of the twentieth century. She studied drama at the university level and at a school that was then one of the country’s best. Hale had extensive experience, both as an amateur actress and a director of productions, large and small. Still, a review of Hale’s own theatrical work provides insights that can help scholars understand how she may have influenced Eliot’s work. Suggestions Hale made to drafts of The Family Reunion have been preserved but details of other advice she may have given were lost when Eliot arranged for her letters to be destroyed. As he was finishing The Family Reunion in September 1938, Eliot wrote her: “I have not told you how invaluable has been, not only your criticisms and suggestions, but your encouragement over the play at the stage at which its satisfactory improvement seemed almost beyond my powers.” He told her that he was now anxious to make it successful, “because if it is a success, we can say that you have had far more to do with it than with anything I have written before” (September 22, 1938). I entirely understand that you would want to remain in the background, without personal mention, in my account, in all the circumstances.” Browne respected Hale’s wishes and did not name her.īut the letters from Eliot and others that Hale donated to Princeton make clear that she played an important role in critiquing and promoting some of his dramatic works. Hale’s response to Browne is not preserved, but after receiving it, Browne wrote back in November 1966: “Thank you too for all you say about the T.S.E. At that point, it had been a decade since Hale had donated Eliot’s letters to Princeton, a gift the university was still not publicly acknowledging. Martin Browne, Eliot’s longtime director, was working on his memoir of Eliot’s productions after his death, he apparently wrote Hale to ask whether he should mention her in his book.
Up to now little has been known about Hale’s own dramatic experience and the ways in which she supported Eliot’s theatrical work-partly because she wanted it that way. Eliot’s 1,131 letters to Hale shed new light on the role Hale played in stimulating Eliot’s interest in drama and providing practical adviceB and emotional support for the staging of his productions. Eliot wrote Emily Hale in mid-December 1935, “that my long desire to write plays is chiefly your doing, because I wanted your applause?” The world of theater brought Eliot and Hale together when they were young and provided the common ground for their maturing relationship as they moved into middle age.
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