The Second Mrs. E

Taxmom spotlights a curiosity: the death of the widow of T.S. Eliot.  Don't know about you, but for me it sounds a bit like the death of Lafayette's drummer boy.  When I did college English in the 50s, we thought of Eliot as a widower. Well, we were right: his first wife had died, unhappy and unhappily, in 1947.  He didn't marry the second until 1957--coincidenteally, just about the time I left college and put away childish things.  By what I read now, the second marriage was happy, at least for him, perhaps for both--not quite what you remember when you think of the glob-girdling Anglophile grump.  She seems to have enjoyed her career as the role of poet's widow, though it is not clear the assorted Eliot-watchers of the world enjoyed her. In any event, for comparison, I note that a person born in the months after the death of the first Mrs. E might be eligible for Social Security today.