T S Eliot : An Imperfect Life

Lyndall Gordon

Biographies & Memoirs

Vintage Books, London

Eliot's New Life

Oxford University Press

An exciting and provocative look at the women who wrote the novels that changed the literary world - Mary Shelley, Emily Bronte, George Eliot, Olive Schreiner, Virginia Woolf - by the renowned biographer of Emily Dickinson 
Outsiders tells the stories of five novelists - Mary Shelley, Emily Brontë, George Eliot, Olive Schreiner, Virginia Woolf - and their famous novels.\nWe have long known their individual greatness but in linking their creativity to their lives as outsiders, this group biography throws new light on the genius they share. 'Outsider', 'outlaw', 'outcast': a woman's reputation was her security and each of these five lost it. As writers, they made these identities their own, taking advantage of their separation from the dominant order to write their novels.\nAll five were motherless. With no female model at hand, they learnt from books; and if lucky, from an enlightened man; and crucially each had to imagine what a woman could be in order to invent a voice of their own. They understood female desire: the passion and sexual bravery in their own lives infused their fictions. 
What they have in common also is the way they inform one another, and us, across the generations. Even today we do more than read them; we listen and live with them.\nLyndall Gordon's biographies have always shown the indelible connection between life and art: an intuitive, exciting and revealing approach that has been highly praised and much read and enjoyed. She names each of these five as prodigy, visionary, outlaw, orator and explorer and shows how they came, they saw and left us changed.

Outsiders

Arts & Literature

Virago Press

“[The] contradictions in [Bronte¨’s] life are not only fully chronicled by Lyndall Gordon’s splendid new biography, but also gracefully explicated to give the reader a vivid and emotionally detailed portrait of the novelist and her work. . . . [Gordon] chooses to use her imaginative sympathies―honed to precision with earlier biographies of Virginia Woolf and T. S. Eliot―to delineate her subject’s rich interior life.” ―Michiko Kakutani, New York Times This highly acclaimed biography looks beyond the insistent image of the modest Victorian lady, the slave to duty in the shadow of tombstones. Instead we see a strong, fiery woman who shaped her own life and transformed it into art. Lyndall Gordon looks at the shared gifts and class ambitions of the Bronte¨ family, and also at significant people―the active feminist Mary Taylor, the demanding mentor Constantin Heger, the rising publisher George Smith―whom Charlotte strove to possess in life and fiction. Drawing on unpublished letters, the “Roe Head Journal,” early stories, the manuscript of Villette, and her last, unfinished novel, Lyndall Gordon explores the gaps in Charlotte Bronte¨’s life. How did she arrive at her understanding of passion from a woman’s point of view? Could she resolve the testing conflict between a writer’s life and a seemingly incongruous marriage to the devoted curate Arthur Bell Nicholls? Looking into the shadow between the facts, Gordon takes biography into that unseen space where this woman of genius was able to live.

Charlotte Bronte: A Passionate Life

W.W.Norton&Company

Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds

Penguin??Books

Emily Dickinson is regarded as one of the greatest poets of all time, but she has come to us as an odd and helpless woman living a life of self imposed seclusion. Lyndall Gordon sees instead a volcanic character living on her own terms and with a steely confidence in her own talent; a woman whose family feuded over a hothouse of adultery and devastating betrayal and a woman who had her own secret. After her death the fight for possession of Emily and her poetry became the feud's focus. 'Lives Like Loaded Guns has cracked one of poetry's most enduring enigmas ...It rescues Dickinson from the image of the passive, heart-broken recluse. It is a worthy monument to a poet even more extraordinary than we realised' Olivia Cole, Financial Times From the acclaimed biographer of Mary Wollstonecraft, T.S. Eliot, Charlotte Bronte, Virginia Woolf and Henry James.

virago press uk

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 own inability to leave home for long, Lyndall's mother believed in migration, a belief that became almost a necessity once the horrors of apartheid gripped their country. Lyndall loves the rocks, the sea, the light of Cape Town, but, struggling to achieve a life approved by her mother, she tries and makes a failure of living in Israel and then, back once again in her beloved South Africa she marries and moves with her husband to New York. It's in America in 1968 when suddenly Lyndall realises she cannot be, and does not want to be, the woman, the daughter and the mother her mother wants her to be. This is a wonderfully layered memoir about the expectations of love and duty between mother and daughter. The particular time and place, the people and the situation are Lyndall's, but the division between generations, the pain and the joy of being a daughter are everywoman's.

Divided Lives: Dreams of a Mother and a Daughter

Virago

James's friendship with Constance Fenimore Woolson ended in 1894 when he tried to drown a boatload of her dresses in the Venetian lagoon; she had fallen to her death three months before. It was an elusive friendship that echoed his mysterious relationship with Minny Temple who had died twenty years earlier. From their graves, these two women haunted his imagination and his fiction, inspiring the creation of his heroines.

Henry James

Imperfect Life of T. S. Eliot

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Books by Lyndall Gordon