Lyndall Gordon's unconventional approach to biography and her search for authenticity within that genre lead her to places in the writer's life that often transcend what can simply be observed. Her intellectual enlightenment consistently pays homage to unbiased and thoroughly documented research. Gordon is brutally honest when she asserts what is necessary of the biographer: "There will be no easy truth. It will be an imaginary meeting of divided halves: the biographer and the subject, the living and the dead." Her intent, as biographer, to expose a life that unfolds a simultaneity of truths, is accomplished in her biographies of T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and Charlotte Brontë and in her autobiographical work, Shared Lives (1992).

Growing up in the 1940s and 1950s in Cape Town, South Africa, Lyndall Gordon was enmeshed in a culture that acted unabashedly as subjugator of people of color and less explicitly as...