Charlotte Champe Stearns Eliot (October 22, 1843–September 10, 1929) was a school teacher, poet, social worker, and the mother of T. S. Eliot. Born in Baltimore, Maryland, Eliot graduated from the State Normal School of Framingham, Massachusetts in 1862. Her teaching career led her to Pennsylvania, Milwaukee, Antioch College, Massachusetts, and Missouri.
Eliot married Henry Ware Eliot (1843 – 1919) on October 27, 1868, in Lexington, Massachusetts. They returned to her husband’s home city of Saint Louis, Missouri where they worked and reared their family. They had five daughters and two sons: Ada (Eliot) Sheffield, born in 1869; Margaret Dawes Eliot, born in 1871; Charlotte (Eliot) Smith, born in 1874; Marian Cushing Eliot, born in 1877; Henry Ware Eliot, Jr., born in 1879; Theodora Sterling Eliot, born in 1885 but died in infancy, and Thomas Stearns Eliot, born in 1888. Eliot's youngest child inherited his mother’s literary skills and became the poet known as T. S. Eliot. In the 1870's when her husband was in bankruptcy Eliot taught school at the nearby Mary Institute.
Eliot was a writer of poems and many of her poems appeared in religious periodicals. A collection of her poems, Easter Songs, was published in 1899. She also wrote a biography of her father-in-law, William Greenleaf Eliot, a Unitarian minister and leading citizen of St. Louis.
Eliot left St. Louis and moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts after the death of her husband in 1919. She died in Cambridge in 1929 at eighty-sixty of a cerebral thrombosis.
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