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- Virago
- Virago
Biography: literary, Prose: non-fiction
The most authoritative life of Eliot ever written, acclaimed biographer Lyndall Gordon brings into focus a flawed yet brilliant man.
Highly acclaimed when it was first published, Virago now reissues Lyndall Gordon's wonderful biography, THE IMPERFECT LIFT OF T.S. ELIOT.
Exploring Eliot's poetry, drama and essays in relation to his life in America and England, and to four quite different women who offer clues to his guarded character, this biography sees life and work as reciprocal parts of one design, the search for faith. 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 that he could not meet it.
Here, close up, is the divide between saint and sinner in the greatest poet of the twentieth century. By viewing Eliot from the vantage point of the next century, this enduring book follows the trials of a searcher whose flaws and doubts speak to all of us whose lives are imperfect.
Lyndall Gordon
Lyndall Gordon was born in Cape Town and studied American Literature at Columbia University in New York. She came to England through the Rhodes Trust in 1973.
She is the prize-winning author of biographies including The Imperfect Life of T. S. Eliot; Henry James: His Women and his Art; Charlotte Bronte: A Passionate Life; Virginia Woolf: A Writer's Life; Vindication: A Life of Mary Wollstonecraft; Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family Feuds and Outsiders: Five Women Writers Who Changed the World. There are also two memoirs, Shared Lives, A Story of Women's Friendship, and Divided Lives, about her mother, whose spiritual journey opened up Eliot's poetry for her. She has written the 'Life' for the Eliot website: tseliot.com.
Lyndall Gordon is a fellow of St Hilda's College, Oxford and a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She lives in Oxford.
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