Hold On Tight: The Women of The Waste Land

Hold On Tight: The Women of the Waste Land

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BBC Radio 4 - Hold On Tight: The Women of The Waste Land

Journalist Jude Rogers explores the fascinating women in TS Eliot’s poem The Waste Land.

On the centenary of its publication, journalist Jude Rogers immerses herself in the voices of the women inside and outside TS Eliot’s extraordinary poem, The Waste Land.

"All the women are one woman," wrote TS Eliot in his deliberately difficult notes to his extraordinary modernist poem, The Waste Land. But who were all the women that race around his poem, and why did they inspire him so much, despite his unease with them? 

Published in 1922, The Waste Land is often read as a response to the devastation of the First World War. But Eliot's poem is equally fascinated by women – some who are revered for their purity and remoteness, others who are repulsively and threateningly sexual. 

One woman who has remained fascinated with the poem is arts journalist Jude Rogers. She still dreams of the modernism doctorate she never did and recently went on a TS Eliot study week for a treat for her 40th birthday. Despite her own struggles with the problematic poet, the beauty and bleakness of The Waste Land still draws her in, leading her to immerse herself in the worlds and the voices of the women inside and outside of the poem. 

She meets other female experts fascinated by Eliot - biographer Lyndall Gordon, who’s just published The Hyacinth Girl: TS Eliot's Hidden Muse, and Frances Dickey, Eliot scholar and Associate Professor of Modern Literature at the University of Missouri. They discuss what it was like to be among the first to read more than a thousand love letters written by Eliot, from an archive that was recently opened after being hidden from the public for more than 50 years. We also hear from Beci Carver, Lecturer in 20th Century Literature at the University of Exeter, and Megan Quigley, Associate Professor of English at Villanova University, who discuss Eliot’s problematic if compassionate representations of women in The Waste Land.

Presenter: Jude Rogers
Producer: Georgia Moodie
An Overcoat Media production for BBC Radio 4

Collage by Catrin Saran James

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