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Overview
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. We meet and follow Rosie, whose career plans vanish into marriage and motherhood; Ellie, who became a psychologist but struggled with her own depressions; Romy, the exuberant rebel who, resisting marriage, enraged the men who loved her; and Lyndall Gordon herself, struggling to adjust to the power games of big-time academia. Yet, 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. This heartfelt tribute to three obscure women who left nothing but their stories, letters, and memories reveals the significance of their lives, their hidden possibilities, and, most importantly, the redemptive power of friendship between women.The acclaimed biographer of T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf, Gordon grew up in the Jewish community in Cape Town in the 1950s and '60s before leaving for New York and Oxford. In this beautifully written book, she tells of the bonds forged in those years with Romy, Rose, and Ellie, who were her closest friends until their early deaths. Photographs.
Editorials
Publishers Weekly -
Drawing on letters, diaries and her own memory, Gordon ( Virginia Woolf: A Writer's Life ) offers a candid and touching memoir of her friendship with three women, all now dead, who grew up with the author in the middle-class liberal Jewish society of Cape Town, South Africa, during the 1950s. Their lives were both clarified and crippled by the horrors of apartheid and by the pressure of their own nearly inevitable destinies as wives and mothers. Focusing on the struggles of her close friend Flora Givent, who rebelled against the bourgeois expectations surrounding her, Gordon's account is reminiscent of de Beauvoir's Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter : she describes Flora's fight to chart her own course. Whatever success Gordon's trio found in determining their lives she attributes, in great part, to the strength of their love for one another. Photos not seen by PW. (June)Library Journal
Gordon (English, Oxford Univ.), who has written books on T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf, here stretches the bounds of traditional biography to encompass the private, unrecorded lives of her three close childhood friends in order to illuminate South African culture and demonstrate how she and other women struggled to define themselves within a repressive society. The author follows Romy, Ellie, and Rose from their coming of age in a white, Jewish, bourgeois Cape Town neighborhood of the 1950s through young adulthood, trying finally to make sense of their premature deaths. Her prose is clear and fluid, her characterizations often vivid. Yet, perhaps inevitably, a book that casts its net wide enough to span four lives and several continents sacrifices depth; none of the other women seem as fully fleshed-out as the dissatisfied, ebullient Romy, and the narrative's abrupt segues--from personal to political, country to country, life to life--are distracting. For general readers and collections in women's studies and South African culture.-- Ellen Finnie Duranceau, MIT Lib.Book Details
Published
August 6, 1993
Publisher
W. W. Norton & Co.
Pages
285
Format
Hardcover
ISBN
9780393031645