Lyndall Gordon, Biographer
Lyndall Gordon grew up in Cape Town where she studied history and English, then nineteenth-century American literature at Columbia in New York. In 1973 she came to England through the Rhodes Trust. For many years she was a tutor and lecturer in English at Oxford where she is now Senior Research Fellow at St Hilda’s College. Each summer she participates in the Writing Seminars at Bennington College, Vermont.
The first of her biographies, Eliot's Early Years (1977), began as a student thesis. The British Academy awarded it the Rose Mary Crawshay prize. A sequel, Eliot's New Life, was published at the time of the poet’s centenary (1988). The two books were rewritten as one, T.S.Eliot: An Imperfect Life (1999), with new material collected over twenty years. Virginia Woolf: A Writer's Life won the James Tait Black Memorial prize for biography (1984), and Virago recently brought out a revised edition. Charlotte Brontë: A Passionate Life (1994), winner of the Cheltenham prize for literature, is recently reissued in September 2008.
A memoir of three women who died young, Shared Lives (1992), is about women's friendship going back to schooldays in the Cape Town of the fifties. The last book was Vindication: A Life of Mary Wollstonecraft (2005). Lyndall is now approaching Emily Dickinson by way of the Dickinson feud. The feud exploded over adultery, but came to focus on the poet. Rival camps claimed her legend and shot each other down over the course of three generations. The book is provisionally entitled Lives Like Loaded Guns and will be published by Virago in London, and by Penguin in New York.
Lyndall is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and member of PEN. She is married to Professor of Cellular Pathology, Siamon Gordon; they live in Oxford and have two grown-up daughters.
New: A revised edition of Charlotte Brontë: a Passionate Life from Virago.
'It would take a great deal to crush me.' Breaking with Brontë legend -- the slave to duty in the shadow of tombstones -- A Passionate Life reveals instead a fiery woman who shaped her own life and transformed it into art. How did she arrive at her understanding of passion from a woman's point of view? What did she gain from her feminist friend, Mary Taylor; from her demanding mentor, Monsieur Heger, and from her rising young publisher, George Smith? Could she adapt to a seemingly incongruous marriage? Among Victorians who liked women self-effacing, she preferred 'to walk invisible', hiding her 'natural home character'. Here is the real Charlotte Bronte: tart, ardent, and veering away from pathos, a survivor who turns loss to gain.