Lee, Hermione 1948-

views updated

Lee, Hermione 1948-

PERSONAL:

Born February 29, 1948, in Winchester, England; daughter of Benjamin (a general practitioner physician and writer of children's books) and Josephine (a writer of children's books) Lee; married John Michael Barnard (a professor), 1991; stepchildren: three. Education: St. Hilda's College, Oxford, M.A. (with first class honors), 1968; St. Cross College, Oxford, M.Phil., 1970.

ADDRESSES:

Office—New College, Oxford University, Oxford OX1 3BN England. Agent—Pat Kavanagh, Peters Fraser & Dunlop Group Ltd., Drury House, 34-43 Russell St., London WC2B 5HA, England. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, VA, instructor in English, 1970-71; University of Liverpool, England, lecturer in English, 1971-76; University of York, Heslington, England, lecturer, 1977-87, senior lecturer, 1987-90, reader, 1990-93, professor of English, 1993-98; New College, Oxford University, Oxford, England, Goldsmiths' professor of English literature, 1998—. Presenter, Book Four, Channel Four, 1982-86; judge for Faber Prize, 1981, Booker Prize, 1981 and 2006, W.H. Smith Prize, 1987-92, Cheltenham Prize, 1987, David Cohen Prize, 1998.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Rose Mary Crawshay prize, British Academy, for Virginia Woolf; visiting fellowships at Beinecke Library at Yale, the Council for the Humanities at Princeton, and at the Lilly Library in Indiana; teaching fellowship at the Beinecke; fellow of New College at the University of Oxford, the Royal Society of Literature, the British Academy, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; honorary Fellow of St. Hilda's and St. Cross Colleges, Oxford; honorary doctorates from Liverpool and York universities; made a Companion of the British Empire for Services to Literature, 2003; Mel and Lois Tukman Fellowship, Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, 2004-05.

WRITINGS:

BIOGRAPHIES

Willa Cather: Double Lives, Pantheon (New York, NY), 1989.

Virginia Woolf, Knopf (New York, NY), 1997.

Edith Wharton, Alfred A. Knopf (New York, NY), 2007.

EDITOR

Anthony Trollope, The Duke's Children, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1982.

Stevie Smith: A Selection, Faber & Faber (Boston, MA), 1983.

(And author of introduction and notes) Rudyard Kipling, Traffics and Discoveries, Penguin (New York, NY), 1987.

(And author of introduction) The Secret Self: A Century of Short Stories by Women, Phoenix Giants (London, England), 1995.

(With David Constantine and Bernard O'Donoghue) Oxford Poets 2000: An Anthology, Carcanet (Manchester, England), 2000.

(With David Constantine and Bernard O'Donoghue) Oxford Poets 2002: An Anthology, Carcanet (Manchester, England), 2002.

AUTHOR OF INTRODUCTION

Flannery O'Conner, Everything That Rises Must Converge, Faber & Faber (London, England), 1980.

Edith Olivier, The Love Child, Virago (London, England), 1981.

Antonia White, Strangers, Virago (London, England), 1981.

Elizabeth Bowen, Bowen's Court [and] Seven Winters, Virago (London, England), 1984.

Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas [and] A Room of One's Own, Hogarth Press (London, England), 1984.

The Hogarth Letters, University of Georgia Press (Athens, GA), 1986.

Elizabeth Bowen, The Mulberry Tree, Harcourt (San Diego, CA), 1987.

The Diaries of Beatrice Webb, Northeastern University Press (Boston, MA), 2001.

OTHER

The Novels of Virginia Woolf, Holmes & Meier (New York, NY), 1977.

Elizabeth Bowen: An Estimation, Barnes & Noble (Totowa, NJ), 1981.

Philip Roth, Methuen (New York, NY), 1982.

Virginia Woolf's Nose: Essays on Biography, Princeton University Press (Princeton, NJ), 2005.

Body Parts: Essays in Life-Writing, Chatto & Windus (London, England), 2005.

Contributor to books, including Literature of the Romantic Period, edited by R.T. Davies and B.G. Beatty, Liverpool University Press (Liverpool, England), 1976; and Virginia Woolf: A Centenary Tribute, edited by Eric Warner, Macmillan, 1984. Consulting editor to Good Fiction Guide, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 2001, 2nd edition, 2005.

SIDELIGHTS:

In 1998 Hermione Lee became the first female professor at New College, Oxford University, where she holds the prestigious Goldsmiths' professorship in English literature. The appointment was based in part upon Lee's scholarly biographies of Willa Cather and Virginia Woolf, but the author also has a long record of edited volumes, anthologies, and written introductions to noted works in modern literature. Lee's biographies are noted for their careful documentation of facts and paucity of speculation, even as she probes her subjects' fiction for veiled elements of autobiography.

In Stevie Smith: A Selection, Lee includes several poems, a short story, some prose, and excerpts from Smith's novels. Lee's selection, according to Vicki Feaver in the Times Literary Supplement, "gives the reader a chance to get the feel of [the author's] work as a whole." Feaver pointed out the edition's "excellent notes" and added, "Hermione Lee's introduction is an elegant and thorough analysis of a writer whose peculiar talent depends on her inconsistencies."

Willa Cather: Double Lives was the first of Lee's biographies to gain a wide audience in England and America. The American novelist has been well served by her biographer, according to Patricia Meyer Spacks in the New Republic. Spacks praised Lee for refusing "to mystify or to indulge in polemic. She writes lucidly and energetically, in firm control of her material and her purposes."

Even higher acclaim greeted the publication of Virginia Woolf. While by no means the first biography of the great English author to gain print, the work was nonetheless commended for its originality and lack of presumption. Lee questions the prevailing assumptions of victimhood that other biographers have attached to Woolf and instead suggests that Woolf was indeed heroic in her struggles to overcome her mental illnesses. Calling the book "remarkable" in Papers on Language and Literature, Allison Funk added that Lee's attempt at objectivity "is distinguished by her ability to remain open, by her resistance to summing up. Further, much of her book's power to keep the interest of this reader comes from Lee's skill in capturing those ‘sharp moments’ from her subject's experience." In World Literature Today, Leslie Schenk maintained that Lee's "research, imagination, organization, and narration are all simply prodigious … as a ‘life story’ Virginia Woolf is superb, magnificent, and therefore deserving of its place in every public and private library for all lovers of literature."

In 2005's Virginia Woolf's Nose: Essays on Biography, Lee sheds light on some of the issues inherent in writing a literary biography. According to Library Journal critic Paolina Taglienti, Lee "successfully depicts the problematical and frustrating aspects of biography." "In four pithy, accessible and philosophical essays, Lee scrutinizes some notable case studies while emphasizing biography's inherent instability," observed a Publishers Weekly contributor. The book covers "a remarkably wide field for such a slim volume," mentioned Taglienti. "Lee's careful scholarship is apparent in her descriptions of several episodes that have been variously interpreted by biographers," praised Sarah L. Courteau in her review of the book for American Scholar. "On the whole, however, these essays read like well-curated exhibits, revealing little of the philosophical framework that has informed Lee's own work. That she offers more questions than answers feels honest but not entirely satisfying," Courteau added.

Much like her biography on Virginia Woolf, 2007's Edith Wharton received high praise from critics. In the book, Lee brings the reader a lengthy portrait of the twentieth-century American writer Edith Wharton, who was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in fiction and "is synonymous with New York's gilded age of brownstones, rustling silks, and covert social maneuverings," as a critic for Vogue put it. Many critics agreed that Lee's biography on Wharton eclipsed R.W.B. Lewis's Pulitzer Prize-winning 1975 biography of the author. A Publishers Weekly critic attributed this success to Lee's access to previously unreleased letters and "the same meticulous research for which her Virginia Woolf biography was praised." Library Journal reviewer Alison M. Lewis felt that "her conscientious research and attunement to her subject render a three-dimensional portrait of this complex woman." Many critics noted that Lee did a stellar job of detailing Wharton's work and its relation to her life. "In no other biography is there a more perceptive analysis of how Wharton's life was reflected in her work," observed a Publishers Weekly critic. "Writers' biographies do not always shed much light on their work, but Wharton's does, for her finest fiction reflects the patterns of her own life and those of the upper-class American world she came from—a society for which she felt a volatile mixture of rage, contempt, pity, and affection," wrote Brooke Allen in a review of the book for the Weekly Standard. However, Allen "did not agree with all of Lee's literary judgments, and felt that she missed the occasional point in her discussions of the various fictional works." Sandra M. Gilbert in her review of Edith Wharton for American Scholar remarked that Lee's "biography will surely be the definitive life of Wharton for some time to come. In its skillful bridging of the author's American and European settings, it presents us with a heroine who might herself be described with the words that James used to characterize The Mount: a ‘French chateau mirrored in a Massachusetts pond.’"

When asked about her interest in Wharton as a biography subject in an interview with Benedicte Page for Bookseller, Lee replied, "I had never really read anything that satisfied me about her … I wanted to find out how this woman was self-educated; how she created her own life for herself; how she spent the money she made."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

American Scholar, summer, 2005, Sarah L. Courteau, "Telltale Hearts"; summer, 2007, Sandra M. Gilbert, "The Whirling Princess: How a Little Rich Girl Known as Pussy Jones Became Edith Wharton, Writing Her Way into the Aristocracy of American Letters."

Antioch Review, spring, 1998, Catherine Kord, review of Virginia Woolf, p. 242.

Biography, spring, 2005, Linda Simon, review of Virginia Woolf's Nose: Essays on Biography.

Booklist, February 15, 2007, Brad Hooper, review of Edith Wharton, p. 31.

Bookseller, February 17, 2006, "Hermione Lee Chairs Man Booker Fiction Prize," p. 7; October 13, 2006, Benedicte Page, "A Self-made Woman: Booker Chair Professor Hermione Lee Tells Benedicte Page about Her Passion for the Work of Edith Wharton," p. 20; October 13, 2006, "Hermione Hushes Man Booker Crowd," p. 50; October 13, 2006, "Lee Protests at ‘Sidelined’ Booker: Booker Chair Castigates Waterstone's as Hamish Hamilton Seals Treble," p. 3; January 26, 2007, review of Edith Wharton, p. 12.

Book World, April 29, 2007, "An American Original."

Boston Globe, April 1, 2007, Kate Bolick, "Q&A with Hermione Lee."

Cambridge Quarterly, December, 2005, Sarah Savitt, review of Body Parts: Essays on Life-Writing, p. 400.

Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, January, 2002, C. Stevens, review of Good Fiction Guide, p. 849.

Chronicle of Higher Education, April 22, 2005, Nina C. Ayoub, review of Virginia Woolf's Nose.

Contemporary Review, August, 1999, review of Elizabeth Bowen: An Estimation, p. 107.

Library Journal, October 15, 1981, Katherine M. Durning, review of Elizabeth Bowen, p. 2030; May 1, 1997, Ronald Ratliff, review of Virginia Woolf, p. 104; April 1, 2005, Paolina Taglienti, review of Virginia Woolf's Nose, p. 94; May 1, 2007, Alison M. Lewis, review of Edith Wharton, p. 78.

London Review of Books, April 5, 2007, "Self-Made Man," p. 15.

M2 Best Books, February 14, 2006, "Judging Chairman for 2006 Man Booker Prize Announced"; March 13, 2006, "Judges for 2006 Man Booker Prize Announced."

Nation, May 28, 2007, Brenda Wineapple, review of Edith Wharton, p. 32.

National Post, April 7, 2007, Caroline Moore, review of Edith Wharton, p. 7.

New Republic, April 15, 1991, Patricia Meyer Spacks, review of Willa Cather: Double Lives, p. 39; July 23, 2007, "Money and the Novel," p. 43.

New Statesman, October 2, 1981, Paul Binding, review of Elizabeth Bowen, p. 23; November 12, 1982, David Montrose, review of Philip Roth, p. 34; February 19, 2007, "In Search of Home," p. 56.

New York Review of Books, April 26, 2007, "The House of Edith," p. 38.

New York Times Book Review, April 29, 2007, Claire Messud, review of Edith Wharton, p. 1.

Papers on Language and Literature, summer, 1998, Allison Funk, review of Virginia Woolf, p. 319.

Philadelphia Inquirer, May 18, 2005, Frank Wilson, review of Virginia Woolf's Nose.

Publishers Weekly, April 3, 1987, Genevieve Stuttaford, review of The Mulberry Tree, p. 60; May 21, 2001, "The Diaries of Beatrice Webb," p. 95; February 7, 2005, review of Virginia Woolf's Nose, p. 51; January 29, 2007, review of Edith Wharton, p. 55; June 25, 2007, review of Edith Wharton, p. 57.

Review of English Studies, May, 1987, Judy Simons, review of The Secret Self: A Century of Short Stories by Women, p. 293.

School Librarian, March, 1986, review of The Secret Self, p. 100; February, 1988, review of The Secret Self, p. 36.

Smithsonian, August, 1986, Gerald Weales, review of The Hogarth Letters, p. 128.

Spectator, February 19, 2005, "The Limits of Postmortem Knowledge," p. 38; January 27, 2007, "Intolerable, Unstoppable, Indispensable."

Times Higher Education Supplement, January 8, 1999, Elaine Williams, "New College, New Milestone," p. 20.

Times Literary Supplement, August 5, 1983, Vicki Feaver, review of Stevie Smith: A Selection; February 4, 2005, "Phantom Limbs," p. 6; February 9, 2007, "Fevers: Passion and Realism beneath the Brittleness of Wharton's Prose," p. 3.

Vogue, April, 2007, "The Ambassadress: A Stunning New Biography Reveals the Passionate Side of Edith Wharton, Who Found Freedom in the Expat Life," p. 281.

Weekly Standard, June 25, 2007, Brooke Allen, "Pursuit of Love: The Life and Art of Edith Wharton."

Wilson Library Bulletin, October, 1987, Mary Manson, review of The Mulberry Tree, p. 93.

Women's Review of Books, June, 1997, Carolyn G. Heilbrun, review of Virginia Woolf, p. 1.

World Literature Today, autumn, 1997, Leslie Schenk, review of Virginia Woolf, p. 797.