Review: Divided Lives - The Jewish Chronicle

By Lyndall Gordon
Virago, £20

Exploring the relationship between mothers and daughters is a well-mined seam, resulting in gems such as Louisa M Alcott's Little Women and Susan Chitty's painful account of her mother, the novelist Antonia White.

This profoundly moving memoir, by Lyndall Gordon, prize-winning biographer of T S Eliot, Charlotte Bronte and others, describing the exceptionally tight bonds between her and her mother, Rhoda Press, an unpublished poet, and the later division between them, does far more than simply dissect that dynamic.

Some of the most powerful passages examine the nature of female illness in the early and mid-20th century and the shame attached to labels such as epilepsy, as well as the author's own post-partum depression and threatened breakdown following the birth of her first child. Gordon believes that, though her mother never read John Stuart Mill's The Subjection of Women, she came to the same conclusion: that women's minds are even more vulnerable than their bodies to men (doctors) who exercise unthinking authority.

The book is set against the backdrop of apartheid rule in South Africa and the difficulty of being a 1950s housewife who must never say what she thinks in public and is expected at all times to be a dutiful wife even if that means suppressing her own talents.

From birth onwards, Lyndall (a name chosen from Olive Schreiner's Story of an African Farm but which embarrassed the child) was to be her mother's sister "because she wants one so… my part is to be there if she's ill. At four years old it's a privilege to have this responsibility instead of trotting off to nursery school like other children." Many years later, Rhoda writes to a friend about the relationship, for one "who has no sister, who is an island in an alien but affectionate family, what a surprise, what a delight to discover in one's own child the close companion one has learned to lack."

Such intensity must threaten suffocation yet this is a tender tribute to a mother who taught her to love and cherish books yet who cannot ever have been easy, much less so once she fell under the spell of a charismatic Israeli teacher, Nahum Levin. Lyndall is (mostly) forgiving when she realises the disruptive depth of her mother's love for him, while recognising the pain it must have caused her father. Rhoda hoped that her daughter ("an extension of herself") would settle in the Holy Land. That Lyndall did not share her mother's dreams in this regard is the source of the growing divide.

When Gordon is present as her own daughter Olivia gives birth, this closeness provides her most memorable experience of motherhood, reinforced when Olivia tells her how important it is "that as mothers we crave and value our mothers even more." So the experience of one generation folds in to the next. But Gordon is clear she wants her own daughters "to bear what fruit they were made to bear without an obligation to be an extension or channel."

This is an intensely female book but its hero is Lyndall's husband, Professor Siamon Gordon, with whom she left South Africa for New York, a man who understood how critically important it was that his wife had her own voice.