We are delighted to announce that Lyndall Gordon’s OUTSIDERS: Five Women Writers Who Changed the World has been shortlisted for the 2020 Professional and Scholarly Excellence Award in Literature. The award, organised by The Association of American Publishers (AAP), honours scholarly works published in 2019. Winners of each subject category will then go on to compete for an Excellence Award. One of the five Excellence Award winners will receive the prestigious R. R. Hawkins Award.
OUTSIDERS is published in the US by Johns Hopkins University Press Books and in the UK by Virago. It has just been published in Spain by Alba and will be published in China by Shanghai Literature & Art Publishing House. In OUTSIDERS, Lyndall Gordon tells the stories of five novelists – Mary Shelley, Emily Brontë, George Eliot, Olive Schreiner, Virginia Woolf – and their famous novels. We have long known their individual greatness but in linking their creativity to their lives as outsiders, this group biography throws new light on the genius they share. 'Outsider', 'outlaw', 'outcast': a woman's reputation was her security and each of these five lost it. As writers, they made these identities their own, taking advantage of their separation from the dominant order to write their novels.
All five were motherless. With no female model at hand, they learnt from books; and if lucky, from an enlightened man; and crucially each had to imagine what a woman could be in order to invent a voice of their own. They understood female desire: the passion and sexual bravery in their own lives infused their fictions. What they have in common also is the way they inform one another, and us, across the generations.
Lyndall Gordon’s biographies have always shown the indelible connection between life and art: an intuitive, exciting and revealing approach that has been highly praised and much read and enjoyed.
A much-celebrated biographer, Lyndall Gordon lives in Oxford. She has won the Cheltenham Prize and the James Tait Black prize, been longlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize, and shortlisted for the Comisso Prize in Italy for Fazi’s edition of LIVES LIKE LOADED GUNS.
Lyndall Gordon is a world-leading expert on T.S. Eliot and in addition to THE IMPERFECT LIFE OF T.S. ELIOT is now writing ELIOT AMONG THE WOMEN for publication by Virago (UK) and Norton (US) in 2022. See more here.
Praise for Lyndall Gordon
'Lyndall Gordon's biographies are characterised by an almost preternatural sensitivity to the inner lives of her subjects...' – Frances Wilson, Mail on Sunday
‘Gordon is a sympathetic but also a sharp-eyed biographer.’ – Telegraph
‘A biographer with soul, she reaches into the hearts of those she brings alive for us. She makes the meaning of their lives sing and sweat as she invites us into their experiences, their longings, their struggles and their disappointments.’ – Susie Orbach, The Observer
‘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
‘Gordon is one of the best biographers writing today.’ – Catherine Hollis, Sacramento Book Review
‘A gifted storyteller.’ – Carmela Ciuraru, Miami Herald
‘Gordon’s approach to biography is imaginative and risky…The result is a magnificent, important book, which points the way forward for the whole biographical genre’ – Kathryn Hughes, Literary Review
‘We are in the presence of a committed biographer in whom the amalgamation of passion and sympathy finds memorable expression.’ – Adrian Wright, London Magazine
‘The tedious question thrown at biographers – “Do we need another book about…?” – is demolished by Lyndall Gordon’s adventurous scholarship.’ – Brenda Maddox, Washington Post Book World
Visit Lyndall Gordon’s website.
