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
Three new books in 2025-26:
Revised and updated edition of The Imperfect Life of T S Eliot
This biography has now been in print for almost 50 years going back to 1977. It was controversial if not taboo in the seventies and eighties 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 biography was savaged by some reviewers, upheld by others like Richard Ellmann and Stephen Spender. In the course of half a century, what was innovative has been validated by the release of Eliot's papers, in particular his letters, early poems unpublished during his lifetime, and more than a thousand letters to his muse, Emily Hale.
Eliot's Early Years (1977) and a sequel, Eliot's New Life (1988), came together in one volume in 1998. In London, Virago has recently published an up-to-date edition. This revised edition is due from Norton in New York in Winter 2026.
Translations of Outsiders: Five Women Writers Who Changed the World
Translations of Outsiders: Five Women Writers Who Changed the World (from Virago in London and Johns Hopkins in the U.S.) are appearing in China, Turkey and Italy. Above is the cover for the new Italian translation from Fazi in Rome.
A reissue of Charlotte Brontë: A Passionate Life
