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T.S. ELIOT: THE SEARCH FOR HAPPINESS is both an exploration of Eliot's life as a poet, playwright, essayist and critic and an examination of Eliot's personal and spiritual journey. Eliot's sudden first marriage ended unhappily. His first wife, Vivien Haigh-Wood, was disapproved of by Eliot's family. Soon after the marriage she had an affair with Eliot's friend and teacher Bertrand Russell. Vivien was committed by her brother in 1938 to an asylum in which she died in 1947, never seeing Eliot again. Of his first marriage he wrote: "To her, the marriage brought no happiness. To me, it brought the state of mind out of which came The Waste Land".

It was late in life that Eliot himself found happiness, when at the age of 68 he secretly married his secretary Valerie Fletcher, a woman thirty-eight years younger than himself. The marriage offered Eliot a deep and extraordinary happiness. Eliot was lifted from his loneliness; he had a social life for the first time; Eliot and Valerie travelled extensively together, they loved each other's company - and they went to the theatre something which, together with Eliot's own love of cats, must have influenced Valerie when, many years after her husband's death, she unexpectedly agreed that Old Possum's Book of Cats could be adapted by Andrew Lloyd-Webber and Trevor Nunn into the show we know now as Cats!

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