DIVIDED LIVES, dreams of a mother and daughter

328 pp., illus., paperback, London, 2014.

A memoir by Lyndall Gordon, in which she explores her relationship with her mother.

"In this fascinating mix between memoir and biography we see the struggle of a daughter, to keep an attachment with her mother that is both close and yet boundaried, separate and connected, an attachment in which each can live their dreams. Lyndall gives that to her daughters. The cloying nature of the bond she has experienced and her struggle to articulate a life outside the home means that she works hard to offer her girls the chance to cleave towards and away from her. This is the struggle of daughters and mothers today." Susie Orbach, The Guardian

Writer and academic Lyndall Gordon was born in 1941 in Cape Town. After living in Israel and New York, she settled to England. For many years she was a tutor and lecturer in English at Oxford where she is now Senior Research Fellow at St Hilda’s College. She has written another memoir, "Shared Lives", and is known for her literary biographies of T.S. Eliot, Henry James, Virginia Woolf and Charlotte Brontë.