Shared Lives
Growing Up in 50s Cape Town
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- 3,99 €
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- 3,99 €
Publisher Description
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. 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.
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.
