The founder of modern feminism, Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) was the most famous woman of her era. A brilliant, unconventional rebel vilified for her strikingly modern notions of education, family, work, and personal relationships, she nevertheless strongly influenced political philosophy in Europe and a newborn America. Now acclaimed biographer Lyndall Gordon mounts a spirited defense of this courageous woman whose reputation has suffered over the years by painting a full and vibrant portrait of an extraordinary historical figure who was generations ahead of her time.

The revealing of the hidden muse - Emily Hale - the Hyacinth Girl of the famous The Waste Land poem - who influenced the life and art of TS Eliot. Among the greatest of poets, T.S. Eliot protected his privacy while publicly associated with three women: two wives, Vivienne and Valerie, and a church-going companion, Mary Trevelyan. This presentation concealed a life-long love for an American: Emily Hale, a drama teacher who was the source of 'memory and desire' in The Waste Land; she is the Hyacinth Girl. Drawing on the recently unsealed 1,131 letters Eliot wrote to Hale and suppressed in his lifetime, leading biographer Lyndall Gordon reveals both the hidden poet and the muse who was the first and consistently important woman of his life and art. Emily Hale was at the centre of a love drama he conceived and the inspiration for the lines he wrote to last beyond their time. 'Extraordinary... a rare work' COLM TOIBIN 'As exciting as a detective story' MARGARET DRABBLE 'Will change the way Eliot is seen' MIRANDA SEYMOUR

"The Wise Virgins" (1913) is a semi-autobiographical novel about a dilemma: whether Harry, the hero, should go into the family business and marry the suitable but dull girl next door or move in artistic circles and marry one of the entrancing 'Lawrence' girls. For, as Lyndall Gordon writes in her Persephone Preface: 'It is a truth widely acknowledged that Camilla Lawrence is a portrait of the author's wife - Virginia Woolf.' This is one reason why the novel is so intriguing. But it is also a Forsterian social comedy, funny, perceptive, highly intelligent, full of clever dialogue and at times bitterly satirical; while the dramatic and emotional denouement still retains a great deal of its power to shock. It was on his honeymoon in 1912 that Leonard Woolf began writing his second (and final) novel. He was 31, newly returned from seven years as a colonial administrator, and asking himself much the same questions as his hero. Helen Dunmore wrote in "The Sunday Times": 'It's a passionate, cuttingly truthful story of a love affair between two people struggling against the prejudices of their time and place. Woolf's writing is almost unbearably honest.'

The revealing of T. S. Eliot's hidden muse - Emily Hale, the Hyacinth Girl of the famous The Waste Land poem 'Extraordinary... A rare work of sympathy and insight' Colm Toibin 'Gordon sifts through the documents with her customary care and delicacy' Frances Wilson, Telegraph 'Thanks to Gordon's meticulous research and inspired storytelling we will never read [Eliot's] poems the same way again' Heather Clark 'Exquisitely nuanced' Kathryn Hughes, Sunday Times 'An illuminating account' Publishers Weekly 'As exciting as a detective story... Gordon establishes the profound influence [the relationship] had upon the substance and in particular upon the imagery of Eliot's work' Margaret Drabble, New Statesman Among the greatest of poets, T. S. Eliot protected his privacy while publicly associated with three women: two wives and a church-going companion. This presentation concealed a life-long love for an American: Emily Hale, a drama teacher to whom he wrote (and later suppressed) over a thousand letters. Hale was the source of "memory and desire" in The Waste Land; she is the Hyacinth Girl. Drawing on the dramatic new material of the only recently unsealed 1,131 letters Eliot wrote to Hale, leading biographer Lyndall Gordon reveals a hidden Eliot. Emily Hale now becomes the first and consistently important woman of life -- and his art. Gordon also offers new insight into the other spirited women who shaped him: Vivienne, the flamboyant wife with whom he shared a private wasteland; Mary Trevelyan, his companion in prayer; and Valerie Fletcher, the young disciple to whom he proposed when his relationship with Emily foundered. Eliot kept his women apart as each ignited his transformations as poet, expatriate, convert, and, finally, in his latter years, a man `made for love.' Emily Hale was at the centre of a love drama he conceived and the inspiration for the lines he wrote to last beyond their time. To read Eliot's twice-weekly letters to Emily during the thirties and forties is to enter the heart of the poet's art.

Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, T.S. Eliot was considered the greatest English-language poet of his generation. His poems The Waste Land and Four Quartets are classics of the modernist canon, while his essays influenced a school of literary criticism. Raised in St. Louis, shaped by his youth in Boston, he reinvented himself as an Englishman after converting to the Anglican Church. Like the authoritative yet restrained voice in his prose, he was the epitome of reserve. But there was another side to Eliot, as acclaimed biographer Lyndall Gordon reveals in her new biography, The Hyacinth Girl. While married twice, Eliot had an almost lifelong love for Emily Hale, an American drama teacher to whom he wrote extensive, illuminating, deeply personal letters. She was the source of "memory and desire" in The Waste Land. She was his hidden muse. That correspondence-some 1,131 letters-released by Princeton University's Firestone Library only in 2020-shows us in exquisite detail the hidden Eliot. Gordon plumbs the archive to recast Hale's role as the first and foremost woman of the poet's life, tracing the ways in which their ardor and his idealization of her figured in his art. For Eliot's relationships, as Gordon explains, were inextricable from his poetry, and Emily Hale was not the sole woman who entered his work. Gordon sheds new light on Eliot's first marriage to the flamboyant Vivienne; re-creates his relationship with Mary Trevelyan, a wartime woman of action; and finally, explores his marriage to the young Valerie Fletcher, whose devotion to Eliot and whose physical ease transformed him into a man "made for love." This stunning portrait of Eliot will compel not only a reassessment of the man-judgmental, duplicitous, intensely conflicted, and indubitably brilliant-but of the role of the choice women in his life and his writings. And at the center was Emily Hale in a love drama that Eliot conceived and the inspiration for the poetry he wrote that would last beyond their time. She was his "Hyacinth Girl."

Among the greatest of poets, TS Eliot protected his privacy while publicly associated with three women: two wives and a church-going companion. This presentation concealed a life-long love for an American: Emily Hale, a drama teacher to whom he wrote (and later suppressed) over a thousand letters. Hale was the source of "memory and desire" in The Waste Land; she is the Hyacinth Girl. Drawing on the dramatic new material of the only recently unsealed 1,131 letters Eliot wrote to Hale, leading biographer Lyndall Gordon reveals a hidden Eliot. Emily Hale now becomes the first and consistently important woman of life -- and his art. Gordon also offers new insight into the other spirited women who shaped him: Vivienne, the flamboyant wife with whom he shared a private wasteland; Mary Trevelyan, his companion in prayer; and Valerie Fletcher, the young disciple to whom he proposed when his relationship with Emily foundered. Eliot kept his women apart as each ignited his transformations as poet, expatriate, convert, and, finally, in his latter years, a man `made for love.' Emily Hale was at the centre of a love drama he conceived and the inspiration for the lines he wrote to last beyond their time. To read Eliot's twice-weekly letters to Emily during the thirties and forties is to enter the heart of the poet's art.

Emily Dickinson is regarded as one of the greatest poets of all time, but she has come to us as an odd and helpless woman living a life of self imposed seclusion. Lyndall Gordon sees instead a volcanic character living on her own terms and with a steely confidence in her own talent; a woman whose family feuded over a hothouse of adultery and devastating betrayal and a woman who had her own secret. After her death the fight for possession of Emily and her poetry became the feud's focus. 'Lives Like Loaded Guns has cracked one of poetry's most enduring enigmas . . . It rescues Dickinson from the image of the passive, heart-broken recluse. It is a worthy monument to a poet even more extraordinary than we realised' Olivia Cole, Financial Times From the acclaimed biographer of Mary Wollstonecraft, T.S. Eliot, Charlotte Bronte, Virginia Woolf and Henry James.

T. S. Eliot once spoke of a lifetime burning in every moment. He had the mind to conceive a perfect life, and he also had the honesty to admit he could not meet it. 'He was a man of extremes whose deep flaws and high virtues were interfused,' writes Lyndall Gordon in this perceptive and innovative biography of the great poet. She brilliantly explores his poetry, drama and essays in relationship to the four quite different women in his life and to his time in America and England. The Imperfect Life of T.S. Eliot follows the trials of a searcher whose flaws and doubts speak to all of us whose lives are imperfect.

OUTSIDERS tells the stories of five novelists - Mary Shelley, Emily Bronte, George Eliot, Olive Schreiner, Virginia Woolf - and their famous novels. We have long known their individual greatness but in linking their creativity to their lives as outsiders, this group biography throws new light on the genius they share. 'Outsider', 'outlaw', 'outcast': a woman's reputation was her security and each of these five lost it. As writers, they made these identities their own, taking advantage of their separation from the dominant order to write their novels. All five were motherless. With no female model at hand, they learnt from books; and if lucky, from an enlightened man; and crucially each had to imagine what a woman could be in order to invent a voice of their own. They understood female desire: the passion and sexual bravery in their own lives infused their fictions. What they have in common also is the way they inform one another, and us, across the generations. Even today we do more than read them; we listen and live with them. Lyndall Gordon's biographies have always shown the indelible connection between life and art: an intuitive, exciting and revealing approach that has been highly praised and much read and enjoyed. She names each of these five as prodigy, visionary, outlaw, orator and explorer and shows how they came, they saw and left us changed.

This critically acclaimed portrait of Charlotte Bronte looks beyond the insistent image of the modest Victorian lady, the slave to duty in the shadow of tombstones, to reveal a strong, fiery woman who shaped her own life and transformed it into art. Drawing on Bronte's unpublished letters, journals, early stories, and the manuscript of Villette, her last, unfinished novel, Gordon takes readers into the unseen space in which Bronte was able to live and create. of photos.

Lyndall Gordon was born in 1941 in Cape Town, a place from which `a ship takes fourteen days to reach anywhere that matters'. Born to a mother whose mysterious illness confined her for years to life indoors, Lyndall was her secret sharer, a child who grew to know life through books, story-telling and her mother's own writings. It was an exciting, precious world, pure and rich in dreams and imagination - untainted by the demands of reality. But a daughter grows up. Despite her own inability to leave home for long, Lyndall's mother believed in migration, a belief that became almost a necessity once the horrors of apartheid gripped their country. Lyndall loves the rocks, the sea, the light of Cape Town, but, struggling to achieve a life approved by her mother, she tries and makes a failure of living in Israel and then, back once again in her beloved South Africa she marries and moves with her husband to New York. It's in America in 1968 when suddenly Lyndall realises she cannot be, and does not want to be, the woman, the daughter and the mother her mother wants her to be. This is a wonderfully layered memoir about the expectations of love and duty between mother and daughter. The particular time and place, the people and the situation are Lyndall's, but the division between generations, the pain and the joy of being a daughter are everywoman's.

Outsiders tells the stories of five novelists - Mary Shelley, Emily Bronte, George Eliot, Olive Schreiner, Virginia Woolf - and their famous novels. We have long known their individual greatness but in linking their creativity to their lives as outsiders, this group biography throws new light on the genius they share. 'Outsider', 'outlaw', 'outcast': a woman's reputation was her security and each of these five lost it. As writers, they made these identities their own, taking advantage of their separation from the dominant order to write their novels. All five were motherless. With no female model at hand, they learnt from books; and if lucky, from an enlightened man; and crucially each had to imagine what a woman could be in order to invent a voice of their own. They understood female desire: the passion and sexual bravery in their own lives infused their fictions. What they have in common also is the way they inform one another, and us, across the generations. Even today we do more than read them; we listen and live with them. Lyndall Gordon's biographies have always shown the indelible connection between life and art: an intuitive, exciting and revealing approach that has been highly praised and much read and enjoyed. She names each of these five as prodigy, visionary, outlaw, orator and explorer and shows how they came, they saw and left us changed.

" M]easured, and brave in its imaginative interpretations." Carolyn Heilbrun, The New York Times Book Review This "original, intuitive, and even exciting" (The New Yorker) portrait highlights the experiences that shaped Virginia Woolf's life and art her childhood, her relationships with her father and sister, her marriage, and her descents into madness."

In this "nuanced, discerning account of a life famously flawed in its search for perfection" (The New Yorker), Gordon captures Eliot's "complex spiritual and artistic history . . . with tact, diligence, and subtlety" (Boston Globe). Drawing on recently discovered letters, she addresses in full the issue of Eliot's anti-Semitism as well as the less-noted issue of his misogyny. Her account "rescues both the poet and the man from the simplifying abstractions that have always been applied to him" (The New York Times), and is "definitive but not dogmatic, sympathetic without taking sides. . . . Its voice rings with authority" (Baltimore Sun). Praised by Cynthia Ozick as "daring, strong, psychologically brilliant," Gordon's study remains true to the mysteries of art as she chronicles the poet's "insistent search for salvation."