Shared Lives: Growing Up in 50s Cape Town - Softcover

Gordon, Lyndall

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1844081435 ISBN 13: 9781844081431

Publisher: Virago UK, 2005

Synopsis

Lyndall Gordon, the acclaimed biographer of T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf, grew up in Cape Town, South Africa in the 1950s. This intimate and moving memoir is the story of Rosie, Ellie, and Romy- her closest friends from childhood until their early deaths.
Daughters of Jewish immigrants, these girls grew into adulthood together, shaped by their parents' and grandparents' Eastern European heritages, the stifling atmosphere of their proper girls' school, South Africa's politics, and the intense pressure within their bourgeois milieu for early marriage. Though miles distanced them as they grew older and went off to New York, Oxford and Paris, their bonds of friendship remained strong, separated only by their untimely deaths.

About this title

About the Author

Lyndall Gordon is the prizewinning author of biographies including CHARLOTTE BRONTE, VIRGINIA WOOLF, SHARED LIVES and MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT. Born and raised in South Africa, Lyndall is a fellow of St Hilda's College, Oxford.

From Kirkus Reviews

Gordon, a biographer of remarkable gifts (Eliot's New Life, 1988, etc.), turns her glass inward and examines the youth and maturity that she and her friends knew in Cape Town, Israel, New York, and Europe: a wide-ranging picaresque story bound together by childhood attachments never set aside. As a Jew growing up in South Africa in the 1950's, Gordon found herself doubly isolated, for the gentile community that surrounded her--and through which she could move only with the most practiced circumspection--was itself implacably sealed off from the black population that comprised the country's invisible majority. The effect was claustrophobic in the extreme and brought Gordon into alliance with schoolmates who suffered the contradictions as keenly as she did. Her narrative quickly focuses on three of these: Romy, Ellie, and Rose--all of whom died young, all of whom struggled against the social and imaginative constraints of their society. This is preeminently a story of exile--the actual exile of those (like Gordon) who left a world they could no longer endure, and the internal exile of those who tried to manage in a place that gave no scope to their desires--and it moves along that boundary between nostalgia and anger that is the exile's true domain. Good use is made of the diaries and letters of those concerned, and Gordon's voice is both intimate and precise throughout--especially as she describes her own difficulties in establishing an academic career. The tribute that she pays her friends is not entirely testimonial, however, for it sets forth the process by which Gordon grew into her own role--as an observer and interpreter of the lives of others. Elegant and strong: a subtle eye trained across years of memory. (Photos--not seen.) -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Virago UK
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 1844081435
• ISBN 13: 9781844081431
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 352