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 difficulties; it reveals the hidden form of the work, [and] indicates how each thing falls into place." Eliot's reputation as a poet, as well as his influence in the academy, peaked following the publication of "The Four Quartets". In an essay on Eliot published in 1989, the writer Cynthia Ozick refers to this peak of influence (from the 1940s through the early 1960s) as "the Age of Eliot" when Eliot "seemed pure zenith, a colossus, nothing less than a permanent luminary, fixed in the firmament like the sun and the moon". But during this post-war period, others, like Ronald Bush,