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“... David Arkell calls his biography Looking for Laforgue and he has undoubtedly found him. Without attempting what is popularly labelled ‘official’ biography, Arkell’s informal portrait is so convincing that it is hard to see an official biography adding more than superfluous detail. He brings us close to the living temper of a poet who is still fairly unknown to English-speakers but who, through his impact on T ...”

“... It is astonishing that since Olive Schreiner died in 1920 there have been six biographies. Why should the life of a woman writing from remote farms and railway stoppings in South Africa between the 1870s and the First World War attract this attention? The new Olive Schreiner has been commissioned with the renewed interest in the feminist heroine of The Story of an African Farm (1883), and this approach to Olive Schreiner, which places her as a polemicist rather than a novelist, may be the most durable basis for her fame ...”

“... VW in a whisper, is humbug? Still, finding meaning in the ordinary life is the stated purpose of Lyndall Gordon’s biography of her three girlhood friends, Romy, Rose and Ellie, who never became famous for anything before they each died, younger than people are supposed to these days. Of course, an early death is almost as sexy as fame and ...”

“... that Eliot’s poetry was rooted in private aspects of his life has now been accepted,’ says Lyndall Gordon in the Foreword to her second volume of biographical rooting among these aspects. This acceptance, which she evidently approves, has undoubtedly occurred, as a root through the enormous heap of books about the poet, now augmented by the ...”

“... Winifred Gérin’s 1967 biography remarked the writer’s ‘good sense – and good manners’, Lyndall Gordon reports that ‘present-day audiences hear the sarcasm undetected by Southey, and never fail to laugh.’ Charlotte Brontë: A Passionate Life is very much directed at those audiences. Indeed, if ...”

“... welcomed the editorial scrupulousness and interpretative restraint of Horne’s Life in Letters. Lyndall Gordon also offers her book as a biographical experiment, but her assumptions about what counts as James’s ‘life’ are radically different. ‘James’s own letters,’ she announces at the outset, ‘are, for the most part, too public, too ...”

“... think like other people!’ Percy Florence was unusual in a uniformly cerebral family. Charlotte Gordon’s premise for writing a dual biography of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley is that while their lives overlapped only for ten days, they shared a spirit. Wollstonecraft’s work – especially her treatise on education and A Vindication of the Rights ...”

“... Did she want readerly guests? Helen Vendler’s Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries and Lyndall Gordon’s Lives like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family’s Feuds take different positions on this question. In the more ambitious and freewheeling of the two studies, Gordon treats not only Dickinson’s ...”

“... abruptly married and turned his back on the academic career that calmly awaited him in America. As Lyndall Gordon nicely says, in her biography of Eliot, both he and Ezra Pound were ‘lapsed professors’. He was working full-time at Lloyds Bank, where he stayed until 1925, and editing the Criterion in the spare moments he didn’t have. This tale of ...”

“... friends and colleagues seem to have treated him as a guru, compelled by his ‘holiness’. Yet Lyndall Gordon suggests that later in life, visited by moods in which evil seemed everywhere, T.S. Eliot sometimes suspected the man he too had once thought holy was in fact diabolic. Reading Williams, you can sometimes see what Eliot meant. Williams seems ...”

“... have become even more interesting because of the sharp and fascinating commentary on them by Lyndall Gordon in A Private Life of Henry James: Two Women and His Art (1998), which is the best single book about James. In the letter that broke the news, James’s mother expressed her regrets for ‘dear bright little Minny’. ...”

“... of Austin and Mabel’s favourite locations for their adulterous liaisons, although, according to Lyndall Gordon, who tells the whole story in lurid, gripping detail in Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family’s Feuds (2010), they proved adept at finding a range of love nests in Amherst, and even, or so their diaries suggest, took to ...”

“... which, in their view, we cannot help but abide by. For Eliot there was what his biographer Lyndall Gordon called ‘a consuming search for salvation’; for Freud, there was no salvation, no redemptive myth, but the secular alternative: a realistic apprehension of one’s incestuous nature, a paradoxical acknowledgment of one’s unconsciousness ...”

“... Charlotte’s 200th birthday was Claire Harman’s Life, the first serious new biography since Lyndall Gordon’s Charlotte Brontë: A Passionate Life in 1994 and Juliet Barker’s The Brontës from the same year (biographies seem to come in generational bursts). All writers on the Brontës now benefit from Margaret Smith’s magisterial – much ...”

“... time). In her rollicking Lives like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family’s Feuds (2010), Lyndall Gordon suggests that Emily would not have taken well to being excluded from areas of her own house for hours at a time while her brother and his mistress did God knows what behind closed doors. Lavinia, on the other hand, quickly became an ...”