‘For rather than assuming an essentialist view, the brilliance of Geary’s work lies in an understanding of Eliot representing the maternal as “enigmatic, spectral, a threshold, a limit and a vanishing point of view… Geary’s book makes a significant scholarly contribution to an understanding of Eliot’s relationship with Charlotte (his mother) as well as the interdisciplinary study of motherhood, mothering and the maternal in Eliot’s oeuvre as well as literary modernism. As Geary convincingly shows, maternal aesthetics and practice is in a sense “queer” – “non-essential, fluid, mobile and open” – and will help future scholars to revise so-called “male modernism”.’
Dr Scott Freer, Editor of TheJournal of the T. S. Eliot Society (UK).
‘A profound contribution to both maternal studies and scholarship on T. S. Eliot’s life and works, Geary puts Charlotte Eliot and mother-child ambivalence at the centre of Eliot’s poetic works. Through close analysis of key poems that keep both Charlotte and her son’s poetic oeuvre in the frame, Geary draws out an innovative thesis that Eliot remains gripped by a latent fascination with the mother, we could say with his own “internal” mother, whereby poetry itself becomes a passage, a means of working through maternal ambivalence.’
Professor Lisa Baraitser, Professor of Psychosocial Theory, Birkbeck, University of London, UK.
'The major book published on Eliot this year is Matthew Geary’s T. S. Eliot and the Mother, a paperback reissue of the original 2021 release. … One of the book’s central contributions is its reassessment of Charlotte Champe Stearns, Eliot’s mother, not as a passive or ‘thwarted’ Victorian femininity, but as an intellectual, activist and writer. … Geary elevates her influence to a critical position in Eliot’s personal and professional development. … Geary highlights maternal ambivalence—‘simultaneous feelings of love and hate’—as a key to understanding Eliot’s poetic evolution. … The notion of ‘maternal allegory’ is a key theoretical contribution of the book. … The book’s achievement also lies within its integration of newly available archival materials, including Charlotte’s unpublished writings and Eliot’s extensive correspondence. … By combining biographical details, literary criticism and psychoanalytic theories, this interdisciplinary research creates a multifaceted portrait of Eliot’s maternal poetics.'
Dr Buxi Duan, The Year’s Work in English Studies, Oxford University Press, 2026
(Comment on the 2023 paperback reissue)
