Gordon’s biographies of Wollstonecraft, Emily Dickinson, Henry James, T. S. Eliot, and Virginia Woolf have received much praise for their meticulous research, acute insight, and storyteller’s eye for the telling detail. Her two memoirs, Shared Lives and Divided Lives, also well received, give a poignant depiction of a young Jewish South African woman on her way to an academic and writing career without sacrificing marriage or motherhood. Outsiders expands on the tendencies of the previous biographies and, intriguingly, picks up moments from the memoirs as well, placing the writer herself as a ‘secret sharer’ (Joseph Conrad’s term, used in Divided Lives): ‘life-writing’, to quote again from that book, ‘demands that we come to know ourselves through our subject’. A bonus for the reader, then, is the intermittent glimpse into what drives Gordon as a writer and concerned individual.

As a literary study, chapter by chapter, the book can hardly be faulted, although readers familiar with Schreiner’s From Man to Man (1926) will be surprised to hear that the offspring of the white male character’s sexual union with the black domestic worker is male (that the child is female is a crucial aspect of the novel). However, even readers already well acquainted with Gordon’s five writers are likely to come away with a new sense of the intertwined lives and writing, a fresh appreciation of the different ways each writer experienced her own status as outsider, or even outcast, and a new understanding of what Gordon calls these women’s ‘inner voices’. Chapter by chapter adds to the imaginative multi-strand network Gordon creates between the five writers, as she treats the key commonalities and differences in their social and familial situations, their often shared reading, and, in many cases, their reading of one another. All this gives a sense of what Gordon’s subtitle alludes to: a ‘world’ in a continual if gradual process of change.

One of the connecting strands between the writers is the set of male–female relations that either encouraged or hindered their literary production and, in complex ways, entered the actual writing. Gordon gives a particularly lively reading of the startling relationship between Mary Godwin and Percy Bysshe Shelley, entangled as it was with other liaisons, both sexual and literary, both familial and social. Reading Frankenstein (1818) along with Godwin’s Journal allows Gordon to present an extraordinarily nuanced treatment of the ambivalent relation between creature and creator, and also to point forward to the voice she finds in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847), what Gordon calls ‘thwarted desires and rage and bared utterance knocking at the windows of our souls’.

Olive Schreiner (Wikimedia Commons)This in turn connects up with Schreiner’s tortured epistolary responses to Karl Pearson, after he rejected her romantic advances; the closest Schreiner came to a productive literary and sexual partnership was with Havelock Ellis, – Gordon refers to Schreiner’s ‘sexual bravery’, given the unusual forms of love-play – but this too was given up, and Gordon sees the writer’s courage directed, finally, into political oratory instead of fiction. In contrast, George Eliot thrived in her partnership with George Henry Lewes. Here, a literary and sexual partnership was possible, but became productive only on account of Eliot’s earlier passion for Herbert Spencer. This passion, unrequited, gave rise to a ‘surging’ of sexual possibilities in Eliot’s writing – female sexual possibilities that were usually effaced in women’s self-representations as well as in men’s representations of women. Ultimately, then, Eliot gave birth to what Gordon identifies as the ‘subtlest essence’ of a ‘developed woman’, which she carefully distinguishes from sentimentality (it is an important aspect of Gordon’s argument that these writers’  ‘inner voices’ were not decorous). The sexual passion of Eliot’s writing is matched by Woolf’s exhilarated apprehension of hitherto ‘unknown modes of being’ as she trod the edge of insanity (‘one visits such remote strange places, lying in bed’, Woolf wrote about her compulsory confinements as a neurasthenic).

Following Eliot’s, Schreiner’s, and Woolf’s explicit interest in what Eliot termed the ‘psychological difference’ of sex, Gordon reinvigorates the concept of a ‘separate sphere’ as a space not just of women’s marginalisation but, rather, of radical creativity – a will to womanhood beyond what contemporary society offered. For these writers, and Gordon herself, the reading and writing of books functions as self-renewal, even self-creation, ‘seeding a new kind of woman’. The use of botanical and evolutionary terminology throughout the book suggests the gradual ‘unfurling’ of a suppressed capacity in these five women that Gordon trusts will survive into the future, so that, as she puts it, women ‘will soon find a concerted voice of our own’. Gordon’s polemic, if this is not too strong a word, itself unfurls quietly enough not to disturb the narrative threads, but it does mean that when one considers the book as a whole, rather than chapter by chapter, the overall argument demands a degree of problematisation. ‘Our’ mostly means ‘women’s’, but since Gordon also speaks of ‘the civilised of both sexes’ and puts male civility down to the development of ‘domestic affections’ in male education, as Wollstonecraft did, she resolves this potential contradiction: men become ‘civilised’ through hearing or reading the voices of women. Hence the difference between Godwin, whose creativity thrived, and her stepsister Claire Clairmont, whose did not: the former had the good fortune to love and be loved by a man already under Wollstonecraft’s influence, whereas the latter’s creativity was truncated by Lord Byron, who, Gordon claims, was capable of no more than a predatory interest in women.

Virginia Woolf (Wikimedia Commons)Since Woolf’s death in 1941, the understanding of gender has undergone a sea change: the public recognition of diverse sexualities – along with social awareness of how deeply transformed gender might be by race, class, religion, generation, geography, and so on – means that it is difficult to speak today with any authority about the singularity of ‘women’s voice’ and women’s ‘separate sphere’. However, Gordon rightly gives play to the ‘counter-story [that] waits in the wings’, the ‘untried potentialities’, the ‘unsayable’ and the ‘unspoken’, and she concludes her book by using Dorothea Brooke’s words from Middlemarch: ‘the roar on the other side of silence’. That astonishing word ‘roar’ runs through the five writers’ lives and writing, and estranges what Gordon means by a ‘concerted woman’s voice’, making the very concept tremble, then, just as Wollstonecraft herself did on the brink of defining a ‘new genus’. Gordon identifies a ‘concerted woman’s voice’ as oppositional to a world of male domination: warmongering and militarism, self-aggrandisement and self-interest, a world ruled rather more by hate than by love. For Gordon, women’s ‘inner’ voice is the bearer of a continually emerging sensibility as it strives to articulate its desire and rage.