Description
Book SynopsisTrade ReviewLiterary biographer Gordon (
Lives Like Loaded Guns) brilliantly ties together the biographies of five women writers who bravely embraced outsider status . . . By addressing an almost inconceivably wide range of themes through the book's conceit—health, mores, politics, pregnancy, economics, sex, sexism, secrets, and silence—Gordon seduces readers interested in all that these fascinating women had to offer.
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Publishers Weekly, starred reviewGordon maintains [a] level of engagement throughout . . . The result is a fascinating study that fully supports the author's thesis. Highly recommended for both academic and general readers interested in women's literature and history.
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Library Journal, starred reviewGordon's voice is most lyrical and assured in her conclusions . . . Gordon narrates their deaths in understated yet powerful detail, stirring some of her most striking observations.
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The New York Times Book ReviewWoolf once said that the role of biography is to give us 'the fertile fact' of a life, and this is what Ms. Gordon, an Oxford academic and biographer, is so good at supplying here. All five of these women believed that their status as outsiders—pariahs, even—was worth the creative freedom it gave them.
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The Wall Street JournalThere is much to instruct and delight in the delineation of the ways in which the lives of these unusual women are reflected in their work.
—Jane Hailé,
New York Journal of BooksTable of ContentsList of Illustrations
Foreword
1. Prodigy—Mary Shelley
2. Visionary—Emily Brontë
3. "Outlaw"—George Eliot
4. Orator—Olive Schreiner
5. Explorer—Virginia Woolf
The Outsiders Society
Sources
Further Reading
Acknowledgments
Index
