OUTSIDERS

by Lyndall Gordon

(Virago £9.99) IN OUTSIDERS, prize-winning biographer Lyndall Gordon brings together the lives of five novelists — Mary Shelley, Emily Bronte, George Eliot, Olive Schreiner and Virginia Woolf — and examines how their outsider status influenced their writing. All five managed, in different ways, to escape the inspiration-sapping grind of domestic drudgery.

Shelley and Eliot shocked the world with their scandalous liaisons — Shelley eloped with the already married Percy Bysshe Shelley and bore his child, Eliot was ostracised when she began living with the married journalist George Lewes.

Bronte’s genius flourished in the harsh Yorkshire moors; a turbulent emotional life inspired Schreiner’s radical idealism; and Woolf married Leonard, a supportive fellow writer.

Gordon traces the ways these writers made women’s voices heard in their own time — and in ours.