Lyndall Gordon, the renowned and award-winning biographer of Emily Dickinson, T.S. Eliot, Charlotte Bronte and Mary Wollstonecraft among others, now turns to her own story with Divided Lives: Dreams of a Mother and Daughter. Lyndall Gordon grew up in South Africa and left her mother and her home to live in America and Britain. Yet the pull of their earlier intense years constantly drew her back.
Says Lyndall Gordon: 'A daughter, in childhood, is called on to be a secret sharer of her mother's illness and creativity. Here are kin who are alike as dreamers, whose dreams will take them different ways: the mother as visionary, the daughter exploring the question of how to be a woman. Though their lives divide, kinship endures.'
Lennie Goodings says 'It's a moving and universal story, a wonderfully layered memoir about the expectations of love and duty between mother and daughter.' Virago will publish in 2014 and before that will reissue Lyndall's biographies of T.S. Eliot (AN IMPERFECT LIFE) and Henry James (A PRIVATE LIFE OF HENRY JAMES: TWO WOMEN AND HIS ART). Lyndall Gordon's new memoir follows her earlier memoir SHARED LIVES, about a circle of South African women friends.
See more in The Bookseller.
Praise for Lyndall Gordon:
'Literary bloodhound and superbly eloquent chronicler.' -- Booklist
'Gordon, a...superb literary biographer who has previously turned her level yet lyrical gaze to Virginia Woolf, Charlotte Brontë, Mary Wollstonecraft and others.' -- Seattle Times
'Lyndall Gordon is a rare phenomenon: a biographer whose preoccupations and authorial career reveal a flowering towards imaginative truth.' -- Candia McWilliam, Herald
'Gordon is one of the best biographers writing today.' -- Catherine Hollis, Sacramento Book Review
'A gifted storyteller.' -- Carmela Ciuraru, Miami Herald
'Lyndall Gordon is known for the thoroughness of her research and meticulous attention to detail … a fine researcher's eye … an exceptional and unusual mind.' -- Janet van Eeden, The Witness