In 1938 T.S. Eliot struck up a friendship with Mary Trevelyan, a passionately curious woman and intrepid traveller. Their relationship was cosy and domestic – characterised by churchgoing, record-playing, day trips with Mary at the wheel or Eliot in his rolled shirt-sleeves cooking up sausages for dinner. Over the years, Mary came to believe that their friendship might lead to something more – but their journey together did not end as she would have hoped. Trevelyan left a unique document – of diaries, letters and pictures – charting their twenty-year-long relationship in her vivid prose. Erica Wagner has brought this untold story together for the first time. ‘Mary and Mr Eliot’ is a revelatory tale of joy, misunderstanding, and betrayal that feels utterly modern and deeply human.