The Archivist

Martha Cooley

Matthias is a quiet and solitary man. His work as an archivist has allowed him to read a very special gift: a batch of letters between T. S. Eliot and lifelong friend Emily Hale which Hale bequeathed to the university under the condition they not be opened until 2019. Matt has read them only to catalogue them but they continue to haunt him - he and his late wife Judith were ardent Eliot readers. Then Roberta a graduate student eager to see Hale's letters befriends him and Matt falls in love with her. Roberta's parents were German Jews who escaped to America changed their name and took up Christianity. Roberta feeling deceived embraces Judaism and hopes to learn of Eliot's own religious conviction from the letters. Matt sympathetic to her plight is caught between the knowledge that he cannot show her the letters and the desire to save her spiritually in the way he could not save his wife.>