Shared Lives: Growing Up in 50s Cape Town

by Lyndall Gordon

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.

Genres: Africa

352 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1992

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)

Reviews

[Marion Roux · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had just finished reading "Letters of Stone" (about Jews during WW2), when I was drawn to "Shared Lives" , a combined biography and memoir of girls growing up in Cape Town in the 1950s and 1960s. Early in the book, Lyndall Gordon describes the lives of one set of Jewish parents and this is so reminiscent of "Letters of Stone". She tells of their flight as refugees from Eastern Europe, D.F.Malan's Quota Act for immigrants to South Africa in 1933 and the survival of this couple being their business, adapting to estabish their independence in a new country.
Gordon elaborates predominantly on her and three of her friends growth and maturation through the years. These 3 friends all die young and it was only in the late 80s that the author felt ready to write this account. The friends were always present in her mind and her research for this book revealed the impact these three personalities also had on other people.
I found this book delightful with a strong intellectual bent. She makes sharp, crisp and pertinent observations. She expounds on deep thoughts and makes thought-provoking comments. 'Thinking' is her forte.

[Alice Lang · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book really made me think about the nature of friendship. The personal tragedies are all the harder to read because they are true, and you know that there won’t be a contrived happy ending. As an exercise in finding the value of writing about a life that might have looked “unimportant”, I thought this was instructive for its method and for the social and political situations it discusses.

[Ellen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Emotional. But felt something missing politically.

[Claire · Rating 4 out of 5]

Growing up in Cape Town... 50's...

[Donna · Rating 5 out of 5]

First rate.