Lyndall Gordon

"Something in her life has so far remained sealed. The poems tease the reader about "it" and her almost overwhelming temptation to "tell"."

"There was an increasing divide between people she wished to know and those she didn't. Her clarity could not endure social talk instead of truth; piety instead of "The Soul's Superior instants"."

""Her widely spaced eyes were too keen for the passivity admired in women of her time. It's the sensitive face of a person who (as her brother put it) "saw things directly and just as they were"."

"Her judgments are full of novelistic insight, pushing into the biographical material to substantiate her hunches, tracing patterns and repetitions in these writers’ emotional lives and in their work."

"She tried to cope with the calamities of motherhood – not only repeated pregnancies and childbirth and childcare, but also the sickness and death of her offspring – while she followed her husband around Italy in pursuit of an ideal freedom."

"Her Divided Lives, a moving memoir of her own childhood in South Africa and relationship with her beloved mother – who was intelligent and spiritual, struggling all her life with illness – feels like a source book for the preoccupations underpinning Gordon’s writing on literature."