Lyndall Gordon was born in Cape Town and studied American Literature at Columbia University in New York. She came to England through the Rhodes Trust in 1973.

She is the prize-winning author of biographies including The Imperfect Life of T. S. Eliot; Henry James: His Women and his Art; Charlotte Bronte: A Passionate Life; Virginia Woolf: A Writer's Life; Vindication: A Life of Mary Wollstonecraft; Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family Feuds and Outsiders: Five Women Writers Who Changed the World. There are also two memoirs, Shared Lives, A Story of Women's Friendship, and Divided Lives, about her mother, whose spiritual journey opened up Eliot's poetry for her. She has written the 'Life' for the Eliot website: tseliot.com.

Lyndall Gordon is a fellow of St Hilda's College, Oxford and a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She lives in Oxford.