Lyndall Gordon (born 4 November 1941)[1] is a British-based biographical and former academic writer, known for her literary biographies.
She is a senior research fellow at St Hilda's College, Oxford.
[2] Born in Cape Town, she had her undergraduate studies at the University of Cape Town and her doctorate at Columbia University in New York City.
[citation needed] Gordon is the author of Eliot's Early Years (1977), which won the British Academy's Rose Mary Crawshay Prize;[3] Virginia Woolf: A Writer's Life (1984), which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize; Charlotte Brontë: A Passionate Life (1994), winner of the Cheltenham Prize for Literature; and Vindication: A Life of Mary Wollstonecraft, shortlisted for the BBC Four Samuel Johnson Prize.
Her most recent publications are Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and her Family's Feuds (2010), which has challenged established assumptions about the poet's life;[4] Shared Lives: Growing Up in 50s Cape Town (D. Philip Publishers, 1992); Divided Lives: Dreams of a Mother and a Daughter (London: Virago, 2014); and Outsiders: Five Women Writers Who Changed the World (London: Virago, 2017).