Divided Lives
Dreams of a Mother and a Daughter
- Paperback
336 pages
- Release Date
13 April 2015
Summary
Lyndall Gordon was born in 1941 in Cape Town, a place from which ‘a ship takes fourteen days to reach anywhere that matters’. Born to a mother whose mysterious illness confined her for years to life indoors, Lyndall was her secret sharer, a child who grew to know life through books, story-telling and her mother’s own writings. It was an exciting, precious world, pure and rich in dreams and imagination - untainted by the demands of reality.
But a daughter grows up.
Despite her …
Book Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781844088911 |
|---|---|
| ISBN-10: | 184408891X |
| Author: | Lyndall Gordon |
| Publisher: | Little, Brown Book Group |
| Imprint: | Virago Press Ltd |
| Format: | Paperback |
| Number of Pages: | 336 |
| Release Date: | 13 April 2015 |
| Weight: | 248g |
| Dimensions: | 197mm x 128mm x 22mm |
What They're Saying
Critics Review
Lyndall Gordon manages to avoid being undaughterly about her exciting, difficult, self-obsessed mother … as racy as a novel
Lyndall Gordon manages to avoid being undaughterly about her exciting, difficult, self-obsessed mother … as racy as a novel - Guardian
A biographer with soul, she reaches into the hearts of those she brings alive for us. She makes the meaning of their lives sing and sweat as she invites us into their experiences, their longings, their struggles and their disappointments … [a] fascinating mix between memoir and biography - Observer[A] beautifully written and troubling memoir - Independent on SundayThis quietly devastating book takes us into many strange terrains but it is to the ‘inner life of that room’ in Cape Town that Gordon finds herself returning. It was there she fountained into one of our most sensitive writers - Mail on SundayAbout The Author
Lyndall Gordon
Lyndall Gordon was born in Cape Town and studied American Literature at Columbia University in New York. She came to England through the Rhodes Trust in 1973.
She is the prize-winning author of biographies including The Imperfect Life of T. S. Eliot; Henry James: His Women and his Art; Charlotte Bronte: A Passionate Life; Virginia Woolf: A Writer’s Life; Vindication: A Life of Mary Wollstonecraft; Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family Feuds and Outsiders: Five Women Writers Who Changed the World. There are also two memoirs, Shared Lives, A Story of Women’s Friendship, and Divided Lives, about her mother, whose spiritual journey opened up Eliot’s poetry for her. She has written the ‘Life’ for the Eliot website.
Lyndall Gordon is a fellow of St Hilda’s College, Oxford and a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She lives in Oxford.
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