the experience of reading in Britain, from 1450 to 1945...

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Marie Larisch : My Past

'... I took up a volume with the uncompromising title My Past by a Countess Marie Larisch... T. S. Eliot was certainly one who read it, and before he wrote The Waste Land... Anyone familiar with Eliot's poem does not read very far before coming upon a similarity of names and places that can be hardly be fortuitous. We have seen that the Wittelbachs – which included the Empress and their cousin, the “mad king” Ludwig – occupied various castles around the Bavarian lake. “The archduke was my cousin” (lines 13-14 of the poem)... The Waste Land decor, moreover, bears kinship to certain passages in Countess Larisch's book. The opening lines of Part IV echo an account of the Empress' dressing-room, with its notable combination of magnificence and ennui. And the "Chapel Perilous" of Part V curiously resembles the tumbledown chapter-house at Heiligenkreuz, to which the uncles of Maria Vetsera carried her mangled remains.'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: T. S. Eliot      Print: Book

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