Biography
Lyndall Gordon grew up in Cape Town where she studied History and English, then 19th Century American Literature at Columbia University in New York. She came to St Hilda's in 1973 as a Rhodes Visiting Fellow to complete a thesis on T S Eliot's early years. For seven years, Lyndall was a lecturer in English at Jesus College, and then returned to St Hilda’s as Fellow and Tutor in English in 1984. Lyndall is now a Senior Research Fellow at St Hilda's and a renowned, award-winning biographer of Emily Dickinson, T.S.Eliot, Charlotte Bronte and Mary Wollstonecraft. In October 2017 Lyndall has had a new group biography published by Virago: Outsiders: Five Women Writers Who Changed the World.
Lyndall Gordon's research interests lie in nineteenth and twentieth-century literature, including nineteenth-century American literature, the novel, women’s writing, and biography. She is particularly keen on archival work, looking at the evolution of texts through their drafts, as in the cases of The Waste Land, Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, and Charlotte Bronte’s Villette.
A full list is available on Lyndall Gordon's website.
Outsiders: Five Women Writers who changed the world (Virago, 2017)
Divided Lives (Virago, 2014)
TS Eliot: An Imperfect Life (NY: Norton, 2000). This is a revised and conjoined edition of Eliot’s Early Years (1977) and Eliot\s New Life (1988)
Vindication: A Life of Mary Wollstonecraft (Virago, 2005)
Virginia Woolf: A Writer’s Life (revised pb, Virago, 2006)
Charlotte Bronte: A Passionate Life (revised pb, Virago, 2008)
Positions
- Senior Research Fellow in English
Subjects
- English
