Divided Lives

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 Sunday

This 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 Sunday

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.