Winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the Miles Franklin and Prime Minister ’s literary awards, Melbourne author Steven Carroll returns with a companion novel to The Lost Life and A World of Other People. Like these earlier works, A New England Affair speculates on TS Eliot’s personal life – in this case, from the perspective of Emily Hale. She is recognised as the poet’s almost lifelong companion and muse, though details of their relationship will remain scarce until his letters to her are revealed in 2020.

Carroll draws his own conclusions in this novel set on the New England coast, where Hale is living when she learns of Eliot’s death in 1965. It begins, however, with the most far-reaching of many flashbacks: 1913, in a Boston parlour, where they fall in love. What follows is a slow reveal of how reticence prevented them from formalising their relationship during the succeeding decades.

Eliot married twice but Hale remained single. They crossed the Atlantic often to visit each other and exchanged hundreds of letters. Carroll presents their love as unconsummated, almost unspoken, because it’s constrained by the conventions of their youth, and driven by fate like the thwarted lovers of Henry James and Edith Wharton. Hale quietly bides her time in the shadows, the Beatrice to Eliot’s Dante, the Lady of Silences in the Anglo-American’s poetry – in contrast to her young singing student, whose pop-music approach to romance is decidedly modern.

The interest of book lovers will be piqued by Carroll’s numerous literary references, though their limited purpose may disappoint. Potentially more dissatisfying, even for those who enjoy slow-moving literary fiction, is that this repetition-heavy novel progresses at a glacial pace as Hale perpetually waits to marry Eliot. There are few moments when A New England Affair does more than linger in an elegantly written purgatory of introspection.

Reviewed by Patricia Maunder