Divided Lives confronts female contradictions down the generations

Divided Lives: Dreams of a Mother and Daughter by Lyndall Gordon (Virago, £20)

Daughterhood, as Lyndall Gordon demonstrates in her intense and semi-poetic family memoir, is a complex and demanding role. At the age of four she would spend most of her day looking after a mysteriously sickly parent, her role “less to do with love than reliance”.

Her mother’s at first unidentified illness required her small, school-deprived daughter to use all her strength to force the bristles of a hairbrush into her mother’s bare wrist in order to bring her back out of what is later revealed as the terror of an epileptic fit.

In prose both lyrical and meticulous Gordon describes a relationship accompanied on both sides by the twin emotions of expectation and disappointment, guilt and rebellion, dependence and emancipation, duty and love; a relationship from which no woman is exempt.

Gordon, an academic and prize-winning biographer of Virginia Woolf and T S Eliot, was born in 1941 in Cape Town under the tyranny of Apartheid, while far away in Northern Europe Nazi brutalities were being carried out against her mother’s Jewish relations. The elder child of mismatched parents, Gordon grew up in a house on the African coast where “on summer nights, with windows open to the murmur of the sea and the salt-smell of seaweed, moths and brown hard-winged Christmas beetles fly towards the lamp”. Her mother Rhoda was a second-generation émigré from Lithuania, a librarian in the local orphanage and a secret poet whose imaginative, bookish landscape undercut her closed-down daily life.

Deeply infused by her Jewish heritage, she was consumed by nostalgia for a time before her marriage when she had been healthy and romantically invigorated, her later bodily fragility concealing a manipulative power over her daughter.

Gordon’s father Harry was a handsome, moustachioed lawyer, a television sports reporter, a flirt and a charmer, “born of the beach, sun, jokes, normality,” his vital outdoors physicality in contrast to the darkened shadows of his wife’s bedroom.

As the natural hierarchy between mother and daughter is reversed, Lyndall’s life assumes a disconcerting upside down-ness where morning is “the darkest time” of her mother’s “shut-off invalid existence”. But behind the bedroom door Rhoda’s literary passion transforms her into an inspiring, fizzing presence. Her small daughter, heavily freckled and “not lovely”, becomes Rhoda’s mesmerised disciple, “the channel for my mother’s life and writings”.

While in brief remission from her illness in 1951 Rhoda leaves her children behind in Africa to spend six months abroad, at first in Finland, and then in London, where she hears Edith Sitwell reading with Dylan Thomas and is seduced and nourished by the city’s literary and theatrical vibrancy. Her children remain in the care of their father, whose tenacity, loyalty and forgiving generosity not only towards his impulsive, unpredictable and absent wife but also his children shine out from the book in a blaze of parental commitment.

After Rhoda’s eventual, reluctant return to Cape Town and a secret affair with an older man, the balance of control shifts gradually between the generations. A mother’s love and pride in her adult daughter’s achievements and in her grandchildren finally emerges.

This is a disturbing and often beautiful book that confronts heritage, selfishness, infidelity and obsessive secrecy and which explores and ultimately celebrates the lifelong emotional seesaw between parent and child.