Scintillating exploration of darkness and creative illumination in the lives of five great women writers

‘A rare phenomenon: a biographer whose preoccupations and
authorial career reveal a flowering towards imaginative truth.’ —Candia McWilliam

Gordon turns her sharp investigative eye and intuitive ear to the lives and words of five extraordinary women who chose to live at the margins, and in so doing claimed their creative power. Mary Shelley, George Eliot, Emily Brontë, Olive Schreiner and Virginia Woolf all stepped outside the bounds of propriety, challenging social norms and enduring scorn and rejection as a result.

Lyndall Gordon tracks the play of creativity of shadow in their lives, and how individual literary brilliance grew from these dark times. In five riveting chapters – ‘Prodigy’ (Shelley), ‘Visionary’(Brontë), ‘Outlaw’ (Eliot), ‘Dreamer’ (Schreiner), and ‘Explorer’(Woolf) – this master biographer casts a beam on formative stretches of experience where each outsider found an authentic voice that was to resonate, sooner or later, in the public ear. Although social convention meant that four of the five writers did not initially publish under their own names, their powerful words now resonate down the centuries.

A VOICE OF HER OWN will be published in summer 2017, ahead of four significant centenaries for its subjects. 2018 is the bicentenary of Emily Brontë’s birth and of the publication of Mary Shelley’s FRANKENSTEIN, the genesis of which looms large in the first section of the book. 2019 marks the bicentenary of George Eliot’s birth and 2020 the centenary of Olive Schreiner’s death.

Lyndall Gordon lives in Oxford. Her ability to make her subjects
come vividly to life has won her many awards, including the
Cheltenham Prize and the James Tait Black Prize. She has been
longlisted for the Duff Cooper Prize, and the Comisso Prize in Italy
for her Emily Dickinson biography, LIVES LIKE LOADED GUNS.