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Lyndall Gordon (born 4 November 1941) is a British-based biographical and former academic writer, known for her literary biographies. She is a senior research fellow at St Hilda's College, Oxford.

Life

Born in Cape Town, she had her undergraduate studies at the University of Cape Town and her doctorate at Columbia University in New York City. She is married to pathologist, Siamon Gordon; they have two daughters.

Gordon is the author of Eliot's Early Years (1977), which won the British Academy's Rose Mary Crawshay Prize; Virginia Woolf: A Writer's Life (1984), which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize; Charlotte Brontë: A Passionate Life (1994), winner of the Cheltenham Prize for Literature; and Vindication: A Life of Mary Wollstonecraft, shortlisted for the BBC Four Samuel Johnson Prize. Her most recent publications are Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and her Family's Feuds (2010), which has challenged established assumptions about the poet's life; Shared Lives: Growing Up in 50s Cape Town (D. Philip Publishers, 1992); Divided Lives: Dreams of a Mother and a Daughter (London: Virago, 2014); and Outsiders: Five Women Writers Who Changed the World (London: Virago, 2017).

Gordon's most recent work is The Hyacinth Girl: T.S. Eliot’s Hidden Muse (2022).

Works

• Eliot's Early Years. Oxford University Press, 1977. ISBN 978-0-19-812078-0
• Virginia Woolf: A Writer's Life. Oxford University Press. 1984. ISBN 978-0-19-811723-0.; W. W. Norton & Company, 2001, ISBN 978-0-393-32205-7
• Eliot's New Life. Oxford University Press, 1988
• Shared Lives. Norton, 1992. ISBN 978-0-393-03164-5
• Charlotte Brontë: A Passionate Life Chatto & Windus, 1994. ISBN 978-0-7011-6137-8; Little, Brown Book Group, 2009. ISBN 978-0-7481-1453-5
• A Private Life of Henry James: Two Women and His Art. Chatto & Windus, 1998. ISBN 978-0701161668. Also titled Henry James: His Women and His Art. Virago, 2012, ISBN 978-1-84408-892-8
• T.S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life. W.W. Norton & Company. 1999. ISBN 978-0-393-32093-0.
• Vindication: A Life of Mary Wollstonecraft. HarperCollins. 2005. ISBN 978-0-06-019802-2. 2006. ISBN 978-0-06-095774-2
• Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds. Penguin. 2010. ISBN 978-0-670-02193-2.
• Divided Lives: Dreams of a Mother and a Daughter. London: Virago, 2014.
• Outsiders: Five Women Writers Who Changed the World. London: Virago, 2017.
• "Dreams of a Mother and Daughter," in Dale Salwak, ed. Writers and Their Mothers. Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. ISBN 978-3-319-68347-8
• The Hyacinth Girl: T.S. Eliot’s Hidden Muse. London: 2022.

Notes

1. "Gordon, Lyndall 1941-". Contemporary Authors. New Revision Series. 1 January 2007. Archived from the original on 28 March 2015 – via Highbeam.
2. Permanent Post Holders. "Gordon, Dr Lyndall | Faculty of English". English.ox.ac.uk. Archived from the original on 6 February 2014. Retrieved 5 February 2014.
3. "Lyndall Gordon". Archived from the original on 8 July 2012.
4. "A bomb in her bosom: Emily Dickinson's secret life". The Guardian. 12 February 2010.
5. Gordon, Lyndall (1989). Eliot's early years. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-281252-0. OCLC 489896022.
6. "T.S. Eliot". Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved 27 May 2022.
7. Gordon, Lyndall (1977). Eliot's Early Years. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-812078-0.
8. Gordon, Lyndall (2006). Virginia Woolf: A Writer's Life. Virago. ISBN 978-1-84408-142-4.
9. "Virginia Woolf". Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved 27 May 2022.
10. Gordon, Lyndall (1988). Eliot's New Life. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-811727-8.
11. Gordon, Lyndall (1994). Shared Lives. Vintage. ISBN 978-0-09-942461-1.
12. Gordon, Lyndall (1994). Charlotte Brontë: A Passionate Life. Chatto & Windus. ISBN 978-0-7011-6137-8.
13. Gordon, Lyndall (17 March 2009). Vindication: A Life of Mary Wollstonecraft. Harper Collins. ISBN 978-0-06-095774-2.
14. Gordon, Lyndall (2005). Vindication: a life of Mary Wollstonecraft. New York: HarperCollins. ISBN 0-06-019802-8. OCLC 57475923.
15. "Divided Lives review – Lyndall Gordon's struggle to cut the cord". The Guardian. Retrieved 27 May 2022.
16. Gordon, Lyndall (2015). Divided Lives: Dreams of a Mother and a Daughter. Little, Brown Book Group Limited. ISBN 978-1-84408-891-1.
17. Gordon, Lyndall (19 March 2019). Outsiders: Five Women Writers Who Changed the World. JHU Press. ISBN 978-1-4214-2944-1.
18. "Outsiders by Lyndall Gordon review – five women writers who changed the world". The Guardian. Retrieved 27 May 2022.
19. Gordon, Lyndall (2014). Divided Lives: Dreams of a Mother and Daughter. Virago. ISBN 978-1-84408-890-4.

External links

• Lyndall Gordon's official site

• Living people
• South African biographers
• South African women biographers
• British women biographers
• English biographers
• University of Cape Town alumni
• Fellows of the Royal Society of Literature
• Writers from Cape Town
• Columbia University alumni
• James Tait Black Memorial Prize recipients
• 1941 births
• 20th-century South African women writers
• 20th-century British biographers
• 21st-century South African women writers
• 21st-century British biographers
• Mary Wollstonecraft scholars