Description

Book Synopsis

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.



Trade Review
[Lyndall Gordon] has rendered so faithfully, so lyrically really, the way things were. Added to the delightful candor with which Lyndall writes both of herself and of her characters, the wry humor of her writing. It is a marvellous book -- Lynn Freed

Shared Lives: Growing Up in 50s Cape Town

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    A Paperback / softback by Lyndall Gordon

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      Book details

      Publisher Little, Brown Book Group
      Published 20 January 2005
      ISBN-13 9781844081431
      978-1844081431
      ISBN-10 1844081435
      Also in:
      Autobiography: general

      Description

      Book Synopsis

      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.



      Trade Review
      [Lyndall Gordon] has rendered so faithfully, so lyrically really, the way things were. Added to the delightful candor with which Lyndall writes both of herself and of her characters, the wry humor of her writing. It is a marvellous book -- Lynn Freed

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