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.
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 brought out a revised edition. Charlotte Brontë: A Passionate Life (1994), winner of the Cheltenham prize for literature, has also been revised and reissued.
A memoir of three women who died young, Shared Lives (reissued by Virago), 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 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: Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds
This story approaches Emily Dickinson by way of feuds in her family, beginning in the poet's lifetime. The feuds exploded over adultery, but came to focus on the poet herself. Rival camps claimed her legend and shot each other down over the course of three generations.
From Virago in London and Penguin in New York.
‘unforcedly and powerfully original’ – Caroline Moore, Sunday Telegraph
‘this story of the terrible fascination Dickinson exerted on her heirs is as rich as a novel by Henry James. ...Perhaps for the first time since Dickinson’s death, [this book] invites us to meet the poet head-on’ – Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, Daily Telegraph
‘makes you read Dickinson again with polished eyes’ – Stuart Kelly, Scotland on Sunday
‘ takes the lid off the violent emotional life of the Dickinson family and its far-reaching effects on the poet's work... an entirely new reading of Dickinson's life with this brilliant tale of turbulence both on and off the page, a situation as intricate as any in the novels of Henry James, where the greatest force lies in what is hidden' - Claire Harman, Literary Review
‘it's a scorcher… everything about it makes me want to sing’ – literary blogger Dovegreyreader
‘gives Emily Dickinson the startling clarity of one of her own poems’ – Frances Wilson, Sunday Times