The University of Michigan community is delighted to welcome back to campus esteemed Alumna, prolific author, and the first woman Editor-in-Chief of the Michigan Daily, Sara Fitzgerald, for a reading and in-conversation in support of her latest biography, The Silenced Muse: Emily Hale, T.S. Eliot, and the Role of a Lifetime. Fitzgerald will be in conversation with Sigrid Anderson, University of Michigan Librarian liaison to the Department of English Language and Literature and the Sweetland Center For Writing.

After the conclusion of the in-conversation, there will be an audience Q&A, followed by a book signing provided by Literati Bookstore.

About the book: In January 2020, the largest and most eagerly awaited cache of new materials written by the Nobel-Prize-winning poet T. S. Eliot was finally opened: the 1,131 letters he sent Emily Hale, his little-known American love. But even as Eliot scholars explore Hale’s impact on Eliot’s work, a tantalizing question has not been fully answered: who was Emily Hale?

Sara Fitzgerald’s book is the first full-length biography devoted to Hale, telling her side of a complicated relationship. Based on the embargoed letters and Fitzgerald’s extensive research into Hale’s life and times, this book brings to light that Hale was much more than just a muse to a literary celebrity. Hale overcame personal hardship to pursue a career as a professor of speech and drama at prominent American women’s colleges and schools. She was a talented amateur actress and director, sharing the stage with others who went on to notable professional careers. Behind the scenes, she also guided Eliot as he began to explore playwriting with works such as Murder in the Cathedral.

Hale’s story is challenging to wholly uncover because the Boston clergyman’s daughter was by nature reticent and humble. More critically, Eliot arranged for nearly all of her letters to be destroyed. The Silenced Muse finally reveals that Hale’s story is not that of a lover scorned, but rather a woman who was herself gifted and celebrated by her students and peers.

Sara Fitzgerald is a retired journalist whose career included fifteen years as an editor and new media developer for the Washington Post. She graduated from Michigan in 1973 with a B.A. in honors history and journalism. She is the author of the biography Elly Peterson: “Mother” of the Moderates, recognized as a Notable Book of 2012 by the Library of Michigan as well as by the Historical Society of Michigan. In 2020, she published Conquering Heroines: How Women Fought Sex Bias at Michigan and Paved the Way for Title IX. Both books were published by University of Michigan Press. In 2020, she also published The Poet’s Girl: A Novel of Emily Hale and T. S. Eliot. Since then, her essays about Hale have appeared in the Journal of the T. S. Eliot Society; T. S. Eliot Studies Annual; Time Present, the newsletter of the International T. S. Eliot Society; and Exchanges, the newsletter of the T. S. Eliot Society (UK). She lives in the Washington, DC, area.

Sigrid Anderson is the Librarian for English Language and Literature and Disability Studies and a lecturer in American Culture at the University of Michigan. Her current research focuses on print culture and women’s reproductive health in the nineteenth and early twentieth century US. She is the author of Fictions of Dissent: Reclaiming Authority in Transatlantic Women's Writing of the Late Nineteenth Century (Pickering and Chatto, 2010) and Settling the Land of Sunshine: Race, Gender, and Regional Development in a California Periodical (University of Nebraska, 2024).