Shared Lives: Growing Up in 50s Cape Town

by Lyndall Gordon (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  2005

  $3.27

  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.

• Used

  Hardcover
  1992

  $36.56

  This is the true story of a group of girls who grew up in Cape Town in the Fifties. They were shaped by the South African past, the absurdities of a girls' school, and the pressures to marry at an early age. All three - Romy, Rose and Ellie - died young. At the centre of the group was Romy, the exuberant daughter of Jewish immigrants. A rebel at school, a resister of weddings, she enraged the men who loved her. As we follow Romy's explosive course, Ellie's struggle with loneliness in her career as a psychologist, and Rose's disappearance into marriage and motherhood, it is the redemptive power of friendship between women that comes to the fore. Through the eyes of a skilled biographer, the significance of their lives is made known, their hidden courage and resourcefulness revealed. Three obscure women, who left nothing but their stories, letters and memories, are brought to life. Lyndall Gordon was born in Cape Town in 1941, and now teaches in Oxford. She is the author of three prize-winning biographies: Eliot's Early Years , Eliot's New Life and Virginia Woolf: A Writer's Life .

• New

  Paperback
  2005

  $11.42

  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.