Away from his Nobel prize-winning poetry, TS Eliot has long been castigated for being a cruel husband and an anti-Semite.

Now a new volume of his letters helps to restore the personal reputation of the troubled writer whose early works voiced the disillusionment of a generation after the first world war and whose later verse about Macavity and other felines inspired Andrew Lloyd Webber’s hit musical Cats.

The correspondence, mostly written by and to Eliot during the 1920s, shows that the American-born poet was often deeply concerned about the severe ill-health of his wife, Vivien, a former Cambridge governess. The couple had married in 1915 when Eliot was 26.

He was so driven to despair by her undiagnosed yet debilitating medical and mental problems that he railed at her doctors, calling one a charlatan and another a “German brute”. He even wrote: “I have tried to kill myself.”

In April 1924 he wrote to his brother: “The last illness of V’s has been indescribable. She suffered more in spirit than ever before. I have not been able to leave her for three months.”

Eliot, who became a British subject in 1927 and last month topped an online BBC poll as the nation’s favourite poet, wrote to John Middleton Murry, the novelist and critic, that his wife had been so ill that for three days she felt her mind had left her body.

He wrote of his own agony: “I have deliberately killed my senses — I have deliberately died — in order to go on with the outward form of living.”

His modern reputation as an uncaring husband, who eventually put his wife into a mental hospital on the grounds of her insanity, was sealed by Michael Hastings’s 1984 play Tom and Viv, later made into an Oscar-nominated film starring Willem Dafoe as Eliot and Miranda Richardson as his wife.

The letters, to be published this week and complied with the help of Eliot’s second wife Valerie, show him in a different light.

Eliot, who was working as a clerk at Lloyds bank in London, only continued with this job, which he did not like, to earn money for his sick wife. At the same time he was also exhausting himself by writing poems and editing The Criterion, a literary magazine.

Many of the letters show his concern for his wife. In April 1923 he wrote to Murry that “Vivien was very ill indeed — in fact for hours at the point of death. It is the worst time she has ever had — she just escaped by indomitable luck.”

Two years later he sent his most despairing letter to Murry, where he wrote: “Must I kill her or kill myself?”

John Haffenden, in charge of editing the letters, said last week: “I’m not sure how absolutely literally we should take this, but these and many other letters make clear his utter despair and agonising.”

There are letters, too, from Vivien where she makes clear her concern and love for her husband. In November 1925 she apologised to him for “torture and driving you mad”. A month later she wrote to their maid, Ellen: “Tell him his wife does love him and still loves him and always always has loved him.”

Haffenden said the letters go some way to vindicating Eliot after he was vilified in Tom and Viv. “These both [the play and the film] made out Eliot as a villain,” he said. “These letters are a corrective.”

Hastings said last week that early on in their marriage Eliot was sympathetic to his wife: “The two were clearly both ill. But the fact is that Eliot and his brother-in-law then got her sectioned.”

Hastings pointed out that Eliot had already left Vivien by 1933 and she was in an asylum from 1938 until her death in 1947, the year before Eliot won the Nobel prize. Eliot never visited her, although they were still married.

His next letters, covering the late 1920s, will be out in two years’ time. One key revelation in the next book will be the number of close Jewish friends Eliot had, which might rid the long-held argument that he was anti-Semitic. One friend was Horace Kallen, the American academic, and their correspondence shows that Eliot helped to get European Jewish refugees to America during the second world war. “There is no evidence I’ve seen of any anti-Semitism in any correspondence,” said Haffenden.

Anthony Julius, the lawyer for Diana, Princess of Wales and who has written a book exploring what he believes to be anti-Semitic sentiments in Eliot’s work, is unconvinced. He points to poems such as Gerontion, Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar and Sweeney Among the Nightingales.

“The views are there in the poetry,” said Julius. “He took the clichés about Jews and used them creatively in his work. But, yes, it is possible to have Jewish friends, too, as we all live lives of contradictions.”

Epic poem’s sad origin

TS Eliot bared his soul in his poetry and admitted that it was heavily influenced by his first marriage and the illness of his wife Vivien.

In private papers written in the 1960s, he wrote: “To her, the marriage brought no happiness. To me, it brought the state of mind out of which came The Waste Land.” Written in 1922, it is considered one of the defining poems of the 20th century. Vivien contributed more than by creating Eliot’s frayed mental state: she helped edit the work which opens with the line: “April is the cruellest month.”

Some of the words in the correspondence to be published this week echo lines from The Waste Land.

In the poem, he wrote:

“He who was living is now dead “We who were living are now dying “With a little patience.”

In a letter to his friend, the novelist John Middleton Murry, he asks: “Have I the right ... to kill another person by being dead, or to kill them by being alive?

“Must I kill her or kill myself? I have tried to kill myself — but only to make the machine which kills her.”

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