The Family Reunion: With an introduction and notes by Nevill Coghill - Couverture souple

The Family Reunion is a play by T. S. Eliot. Written mostly in blank verse (though not iambic pentameter), it incorporates elements from Greek drama and mid-twentieth-century detective plays to portray the hero's journey from guilt to redemption. The play was unsuccessful when first presented in 1939, and was later regarded as unsatisfactory by its author, but has been successfully revived since the 1940s. Some critics have thought aspects of the tormented hero reflect Eliot's own difficulties with his estrangement from his first wife. The play is in two acts, set in Wishwood, a stately home in the north of England. At the beginning, the family of Amy, Dowager Lady Monchensey are assembling for her birthday party. She is, as her doctor later explains, clinging on to life by sheer willpower: ...........I keep Wishwood alive To keep the family alive, to keep them together, To keep me alive, and I keep them. Lady Monchensey's two brothers-in-law and three sisters are present, and a younger relation, Mary, but none of Lady Monchensey's three sons. Among other things they discuss the sudden, and not to them wholly unwelcome, death at sea of the wife of the eldest son Harry, the present Lord Monchensey. Neither of the younger sons ever appears, both being slightly injured in motoring accidents, but Harry soon arrives, his first appearance at Wishwood for eight years. He is haunted by the belief that he pushed his wife off the ship. In fact Harry has an alibi for the time, but whether he killed her or not he wished her dead and his feelings of guilt are the driving force in the rest of the play...

A modern verse play dealing with the problem of man’s guilt and his need for expiation through his acceptance of responsibility for the sin of humanity. “What poets and playwrights have been fumbling at in their desire to put poetry into drama and drama into poetry has here been realized.... This is the finest verse play since the Elizabethans” (New York Times).