Proscritas

Lyndall Gordon in Outlaws recalls the path the pioneers led with illustrative and detailed biographical portraits of five great writers who spoke in a society that would have preferred them to be silent: Mary Shelley ("Prodigy"), Emily Brontë ("Visionary") , George Eliot ("Rebel"), Olive Schreiner ("Speaker") and Virginia Woolf ("Explorer"). Drawing sometimes painful links between his life and his work, Gordon delves into his ambiguous family relationships, his desire for education, his conception of anonymity, his position vis-à-vis the social hierarchy, men and sex, his rejection of the artifices of femininity and its productive inquiry in silence and shadow.