Helen Gardner (critic) Helen Gardner (critic) Dame Helen Louise Gardner, (13 February 1908 – 4 June 1986) was an English literary critic and academic. She was best known for her work on the poets John Donne and T. S. Eliot. Helen Louise Gardner was born in Finchley, Middlesex in 1908, the middle child and only daughter of the journalist Charles Gardner and his wife, also named Helen. She was eleven when her father died and the family thereafter made their home with her grandparents. Helen's mother was highly ambitious for her gifted daughter, who demonstrated artistic talent from an early age. Gardner's early
T. S. Eliot for the authorship of one scene and the choruses. George Bell, the Bishop of Chichester, had been instrumental in connecting Eliot with producer E. Martin Browne for the production of "The Rock", and later commissioned Eliot to write another play for the Canterbury Festival in 1935. This one, "Murder in the Cathedral", concerning the death of the martyr, Thomas Becket, was more under Eliot's control. Eliot biographer Peter Ackroyd comments that "for [Eliot], "Murder in the Cathedral" and succeeding verse plays offered a double advantage; it allowed him to practice poetry but it also offered a convenient home for his