Lyndall Gordon, Biographer
Lyndall Gordon left South Africa for New York where she was a student at Columbia. Afterwards she moved to Oxford through the Rhodes Trust. She is a Fellow of St Hilda's College, Oxford and the Royal Society of Literature.
Virago has published her eight biographies and two memoirs, including The Imperfect Life of TS Eliot and Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and her Family's Feuds. In the U.S. she is published mostly by Norton; in China by Shanghai Literature & Art; in Italy by Fazi; in Turkey by Alfa.
Awards: The British Academy's Rose Mary Crawshay Prize; Cheltenham Prize for Literature; Southern Arts Prize; James Tait Black prize for biography
Shortlisted: Duff Cooper Prize and Italy's Comisso Prize for biography
New in 2026: Revised and updated Norton edition of TS Eliot: An Imperfect Life
This biography has been in print for fifty years. In the last century it was controversial to question the poet's claim to “impersonality"; to bring out the private, emotional core of Eliot's poetry and plays; to suggest the centrality of a hidden muse; to see the turning point of his religious life in his early years, long before his mid-life conversion and, with that, to bring out the single-minded continuity of his life and work. The book was savaged by some early reviewers but upheld by Richard Ellmann and Stephen Spender. Eliot's Early Years (1977) and a sequel, Eliot's New Life (1988), came together in Norton's one volume edition in 1999. Since then, what was innovative has been validated by the release of Eliot's papers, in particular his letters, early poems unpublished during his lifetime, a telling memoir by his companion in prayer Mary Trevelyan, and more than a thousand letters to a woman he loved.