Closest of Strangers: South African Women's Life Writing

by Lyndall Gordon (Introduction)

The experiences of women from all race groups, classes and political persuasions are brought to life in this compelling collection of extracts. Living in close proximity but often in vastly different realities, South African women were, in many ways, "the closest of strangers" to each other, and their relationships were marked by both intimacy and alienation. The selection draws on a large number of autobiographical texts by both ordinary and extraordinary women such as Sarah Raal, Emily Hobhouse, Pauline Smith, Phyllis Ntantala, Dr. Goonam, Katie Makanya, Pauline Podbrey, Norma Kitson, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, Helen Joseph, Ruth First, Helen Suzman, Bessie Head, Mamphela Ramphele, Emma Mashinini, Antjie Krog, Charlene Smith, and Maria Ndlovu.

Paperback

First published January 1, 2004

About the author

Lyndall Gordon (born 4 November 1941) is a British-based writer and academic, known for her literary biographies. She is a Senior Research Fellow at St Hilda's College, Oxford.

Born in Cape Town, she was an undergraduate at the University of Cape Town, then a doctoral student at Columbia University in New York City. She married the pathologist Siamon Gordon; they have two daughters.

Gordon is the author of Eliot's Early Years (1977), which won the British Academy's Rose Mary Crawshay Prize; Virginia Woolf: A Writer's Life (1984), which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize; Charlotte Brontë: A Passionate Life (1994), winner of the Cheltenham Prize for Literature; and Vindication: A Life of Mary Wollstonecraft, shortlisted for the BBC Four Samuel Johnson Prize. Her most recent publication is Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and her Family's Feuds (2010), which has overturned the established assumptions about the poet's life.

(from Wikipedia)