Thought-provoking ... Gordon is an imaginative and rigorous biographer who has already addressed the lives of Wollstonecraft, Charlotte Brontë and Woolf in full-length books, but the pleasure in this compact volume is the way in which she weaves these lives together, building links across the generations ... One of Gordon’s strengths is always to recognize the tension inherent in biography’s form: finally, how can we know anything? Evidence of anyone’s life is only ever fragmentary ... The truth of these artists’ lives can be found in their writing, and it is to their writing that Gordon listens, closely, attentively, always resisting easy biographical links ... This is no primer to the authors’ works, but it’s not meant to be. That said, it is never rebarbative to the reader with a lesser knowledge of those works—indeed it is enticing ... The real strength of Outsiders, however, is its vivid portrayal of its subjects’ energy, their ability—often at great cost—to find ways to speak. If there is an argument to be had with this book, it’s with that subtitle, and the cliché of 'changed the world'. I have a sneaking suspicion that Gordon would be among the first to admit that—alas, just look around—they didn’t. The battle is still to be won.

Gordon is best known for her brilliant studies of Woolf, Charlotte Brontë and Emily Dickinson. As a biographer, she’s been a visionary herself, mind-reading her way into these figures’ creative processes. She displays the same insight here, reading Frankenstein as Mary Shelley’s effort to confront her estrangement from her father, and suggesting that Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights may have been Emily Brontë’s embodiment of 'Nature itself, red in tooth and claw.' But this is a slighter book than her previous ones: Its attempts to bring the lives together aren’t sustained, and it can feel as if too much is lost in the brief studies of such well-known names ... Gordon’s voice is most lyrical and assured in her conclusions...I wanted more gems like these, and more on the resonance of these women’s stories today ... Gordon rightly links all five by their shared understanding of death and violence, and as a result her own book is haunted by child mortality ... Gordon narrates their deaths in understated yet powerful detail, stirring some of her most striking observations.

Gordon writes with passionate intelligence about the literature she loves. Since she first published her book on TS Eliot in 1977, she has developed her distinctive way of weaving together the writer’s life and writing ... Gordon is a natural storyteller, and the lives stir us and fascinate us no matter how well we already know them ... [Gordon] judgments are full of novelistic insight, pushing into the biographical material to substantiate her hunches, tracing patterns and repetitions in these writers’ emotional lives and in their work ... Gordon in her eager, hurrying inclusiveness wants to make each of her writers a way-station in a progressive evolution...Would we want to construct an equivalent consecutive history out of the lives of five male writers, even if some were also outsiders in a sense?...We might want to link them in terms of influence in their work, but probably not through their private lives. And in emphasising the female writers’ role as precursors or visionaries, we risk underplaying how distinctively each one is of her own age, participating in its idiom and its worldview as well as helping to form these.

Lively and enterprising ... Gordon can seem too eager to affiliate her subjects and sometimes gives her overt admiration too free a rein...Yet when not so obviously in thrall, the portrayals are vivid, the research and its conclusions adept ... Most stirringly, all five [women] had an eye to empowering future generations.

Woolf once said that the role of biography is to give us 'the fertile fact' of a life, and this is what Ms. Gordon, an Oxford academic and biographer, is so good at supplying here.

This is not a straightforward work of literary biography. Lyndall Gordon has already reconstructed the lives of many greats, from Mary Wollstonecraft to Emily Dickinson. However, here she attempts something more creative, more novelistic than usual: the unification of five biographies, diverse narratives with a common theme ... One of the book’s great strengths is the sense it creates of 'a chain of making': the overlap and interplay between the generations is richly evoked ... Occasionally, it seems as if Gordon is pushing Schreiner too hard ... Mostly, though, Gordon is a scrupulously restrained biographer—sometimes almost too cautious ... Also impressive is the feat of concision: each section forms a compressed yet complete biography. Only rarely do we feel that something crucial has been hastily treated ... Reading Outsiders at the end of 2017, I can’t help wondering if this book isn’t a fraction too late, whether Woolf’s question about the nature of woman hasn’t already expired. Perhaps the answer we are finally coming to, as gender norms crumble around us, is that the question was misconceived. Gordon’s binding agent relies on the belief that there is some essential, hidden femaleness waiting to be uncovered. Her subjects were women, but that isn’t an identical condition. They didn’t spend all their time 'being women.'

Outsiders has some peculiarities and flaws, that...can enchant and frustrate. The critic and novelist Philip Hensher, in his review for The Spectator, put his finger on both the vagueness and inaccuracy of 'outsider' as a label for all of these women ... Some are born to outsiderhood, others achieve it. Does Gordon thrust outsiderhood on these women? Why did she choose these writers, whose stories, even Schreiner’s, have been so frequently rehearsed? Ultimately what really connects Gordon’s version of these lives is her own sensibility. These writers reward the kind of reading Gordon excels at—intensely focused writing with pressure put on words and images, at least as important as any 'message' a poem or novel might have ... . In the scholarly Outsiders, there are many, many moments in these stories (including in the footnotes) where Gordon strips away the familiar known fact to give us a better sense of the confusion of a life as it is lived .... Her vision keenly perceives below surface quirks to the deep weirdness of an individual personality ... I particularly admire Gordon’s care in stopping before she falls off into what is not there. For Emily Brontë, for instance, she says, 'It is difficult or impossible to reach her except through her writings. She will not say some of the things you and I would most like to know' ... On Gordon’s long journey in Outsiders, there are places I can’t or won’t follow her. My margins are marked with quibbles, cavils, different judgment calls, profound disagreement, and what I think are a few downright errors. But however humanly imperfect, this book, filled with wisdom, is Gordon’s rutter to the voyage out. There is no frigate like a book to take us lands away.

Literary biographer Gordon...brilliantly ties together the biographies of five women writers ... Painstakingly examining her subjects’ diaries, letters, speeches, and novels, as well as their lives and times, Gordon draws close connections between them ... By addressing an almost inconceivably wide range of themes through the book’s conceit—health, mores, politics, pregnancy, economics, sex, sexism, secrets, and silence—Gordon seduces readers interested in all that these fascinating women had to offer.