Valerie Eliot Valerie Eliot Esmé Valerie Eliot (née Fletcher; 17 August 19269 November 2012) was the second wife and later widow of the Nobel prize-winning poet, T. S. Eliot. She was a major stockholder in the publishing firm of Faber and Faber Limited and the editor and annotator of a number of books dealing with her late husband's writings. The daughter of an insurance manager in Leeds, she was educated at Queen Anne's School, Caversham, where she was reputed to have told her headteacher that she knew precisely what she wanted to become: secretary to TS Eliot. Valerie married Eliot, almost 40
T. S. Eliot is unmistakable. It reaches out like a clear signal to the reader." Julius's viewpoint has been supported by literary critics such as Harold Bloom, Christopher Ricks, George Steiner, Tom Paulin and James Fenton. In a series of lectures delivered at the University of Virginia in 1933, published under the title "After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy" (1934), Eliot wrote of societal tradition and coherence, "What is still more important [than cultural homogeneity] is unity of religious background, and reasons of race and religion combine to make any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable." Eliot never re-published this book/lecture.