Shared Lives: A Remembrance

Drawing on letters, diaries and her own memory, Gordon ( Virginia Woolf: A Writer's Life ) offers a candid and touching memoir of her friendship with three women, all now dead, who grew up with the author in the middle-class liberal Jewish society of Cape Town, South Africa, during the 1950s. Their lives were both clarified and crippled by the horrors of apartheid and by the pressure of their own nearly inevitable destinies as wives and mothers. Focusing on the struggles of her close friend Flora Givent, who rebelled against the bourgeois expectations surrounding her, Gordon's account is reminiscent of de Beauvoir's Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter : she describes Flora's fight to chart her own course. Whatever success Gordon's trio found in determining their lives she attributes, in great part, to the strength of their love for one another. Photos not seen by PW. (June)