Lyndall Gordon
Agent: Isobel Dixon
Assistant: Sian Ellis-Martin
Biography: A much-celebrated biographer, Lyndall Gordon lives in Oxford. Her ability to make the subjects of her biographies come vividly to life has won her many literary awards, including the Cheltenham Prize and the James Tait Black prize. She has also been longlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize and shortlisted for the Duff Cooper Prize and the Comisso Prize.
Candia McWilliam calls her 'A rare phenomenon: a biographer whose preoccupations and authorial career reveal a flowering towards imaginative truth.' Brenda Maddox talks of her 'adventurous scholarship'.
THE HYACINTH GIRL was published by Virago (UK) in October 2022 and by Norton (US) in November 2022, the year of the centenary of The Waste Land.
Selected praise for THE HYACINTH GIRL
‘Extraordinary…. A rare work of sympathy and insight… Her ability to see both complexity and simplicity in the relationship between Eliot and Hale means that their entangled world comes fully alive in this brilliant book.’ – Colm Tóibín, author of THE MAGICIAN
‘This is a work that will change the way that Eliot is seen.’ – Miranda Seymour, author of I USED TO LIVE HERE ONCE: THE HAUNTED LIFE OF JEAN RHYS
‘There is no finer guide into the mind of T.S. Eliot than Lyndall Gordon. Thanks to Gordon’s meticulous research and inspired storytelling, we will never read these poems the same way again… Emily Hale, too, finally gets her due in this brilliant and revelatory work from one of our greatest biographers.’ – Heather Clark, author of the Pulitzer Prize finalist RED COMET: THE SHORT LIFE AND BLAZING ART OF SYLVIA PLATH
THE HYACINTH GIRL: TS ELIOT’S HIDDEN MUSE
Literary biography, 432 pages, Virago, October 2022
The loves inextricable from his poetry, especially the one kept secret.
Among the greatest of poets, T.S. Eliot protected his privacy while publicly associated with three women: two wives and a churchgoing companion. Yet he concealed a longtime love for an obscure American: Emily Hale, a drama teacher to whom he wrote (and later suppressed) over a thousand letters. Hale was the source of “memory and desire” in The Waste Land: she is the Hyacinth Girl.
Drawing on the dramatic new material of the only recently unsealed 1,131 letters Eliot wrote to Hale, leading biographer Lyndall Gordon reveals a hidden Eliot. Emily Hale now becomes the first and consistently important woman of life — and his art. Gordon also offers new insight into the other spirited women who shaped his him: Vivienne, the flamboyant wife with whom he shared a private wasteland; Mary Trevelyan, his companion in prayer; and Valerie Fletcher, the young disciple to whom he proposed when his relationship with Emily foundered. Though Eliot kept his women apart, they spurred his transformations as poet, expatriate, convert, and, finally, in his latter years, a man ‘made for love.’
Emily Hale was at the centre of a love drama he conceived and the inspiration for the lines he wrote to last beyond their time. To read Eliot’s twice-weekly letters to Emily during the thirties and forties is to enter the heart of the poet’s art.
OUTSIDERS: FIVE WOMEN WRITERS WHO CHANGED THE WORLD
Literary Biography, 336 pages
Virago, October 2017
Lyndall Gordon turns her insightful gaze to several extraordinary literary women who chose to live and create at the margins. In powerful chapters with titles like ‘Prodigy’, ‘Spinster’ and ‘Visionary’, she focuses on the connections between creativity and shadow in lives at their boldest moment – the lives of Mary Shelley, Emily Brontë, George Eliot, Olive Schreiner and Virginia Woolf.
LIVES LIKE LOADED GUNS: EMILY DICKINSON AND HER FAMILY'S FEUDS
Literary biography, 491 pages
Virago, April 2011
Shortlisted for The Duff Cooper Prize 2010
Shortlisted for the Comisso Prize, Italy in 2013
A groundbreaking biography of the elusive American poet, delving into the reasons for Emily Dickinson's legendary reclusiveness.
VIRGINIA WOOLF: A WRITER'S LIFE
Literary biography, 370 pages
Virago, January 2007
Winner of the James Tait Black prize for biography
'A masterpiece of the kind of intuitive biography in which Virginia Woolf herself believed.' -- The Times Higher Educational Supplement