Dame Hermione Lee | |
|---|---|
| Born | 29 February 1948 Winchester, Hampshire, England |
| Occupation | Biographer, literary critic and academic |
| Education | |
| Notable works | The Novels of Virginia Woolf; Willa Cather: A Life Saved Up; Body Parts: Essays on Life-Writing |
| Notable awards | Dame Grand Cross of the Order of the British Empire |
| Spouse | John Barnard |
| Website | |
| www | |
Dame Hermione Lee (born 29 February 1948 [1] ) is a British biographer, literary critic and academic. She is a former President of Wolfson College, Oxford, and a former Goldsmiths' Professor of English Literature in the University of Oxford and Professorial Fellow of New College. She is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Society of Literature. [2]
Born in Winchester, Hampshire, daughter of Benjamin Lee (1922-2019), of Polish and Lithuanian Jewish parentage, and Josephine, née Anderson (died 2003), [3] Lee grew up in London, where her father was a GP. She was educated at the Lycée Français Charles de Gaulle, City of London School for Girls, and Queen's College, London. She took a first-class degree in English Literature at St Hilda's College, Oxford, in 1968 and an MPhil at St Cross College, Oxford, in 1970. [4]
Lee has taught at the College of William and Mary in Virginia, at the University of Liverpool (where she was awarded an Honorary DLitt in 2002) and at the University of York, from 1977 to 1998, where she held a personal chair in the Department of English and Related Literature, and where she received an Honorary DLitt in 2007. Since 1998, she has been the Goldsmiths' Professor of English Literature and the first woman Professorial Fellow of New College, Oxford. [5] She succeeded Sir Gareth Roberts as the sixth President of Wolfson College, Oxford, in 2008, serving until the end of academic year 2016–17. She is a lifetime Honorary Fellow of the Rothermere American Institute at the University of Oxford. [6]
Lee is a Fellow of the British Academy, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a Fellow of the Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford, an Honorary Fellow of St Hilda's and St Cross College, Oxford; [4] and a member of the Athenaeum Club.
Appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 2003 for services to literature, [7] Lee was promoted to Dame Commander (DBE) in the 2013 Birthday Honours for services to literary scholarship, [8] and again to Dame Grand Cross (GBE) in the 2023 New Year Honours for services to English literature. [9]
In the US, Lee has been a Visiting Fellow teaching at the Beinecke Library at Yale University, a Whitney J. Oates Fellow at the Council for the Humanities at Princeton, an Everett Helm Visiting Fellow at the Lilly Library at the Indiana University at Bloomington, and the Mel and Lois Tukman Fellow of the New York Public Library's Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers in 2004–05. In 2003, she became a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Lee has written widely on women writers, American literature, life-writing, and modern fiction. Her books include The Novels of Virginia Woolf (1977); a study of the Anglo-Irish novelist Elizabeth Bowen (1981, revised 1999); a short critical book, the first published in Britain, on Philip Roth (1982) and a critical biography of the American novelist Willa Cather, Willa Cather: A Life Saved Up (1989, reissued in a revised edition by Virago in 2008).
She published a major biography of Virginia Woolf (1996), which won the British Academy Rose Mary Crawshay Prize, [7] and was named as one of The New York Times Book Review ′s best books of 1997.
Lee has published a collection of essays on biography and autobiography, Body Parts: Essays on Life-Writing (2005), and a biography of Edith Wharton, published to mixed reviews in 2007 by Chatto & Windus and Knopf. In 2013 the playwright Tom Stoppard asked her to write his biography. It was published in 2020. [10]
She has edited and introduced numerous editions and anthologies of Kipling, Trollope, Virginia Woolf, Stevie Smith, Elizabeth Bowen, Willa Cather, Eudora Welty, and Penelope Fitzgerald. She was one of the co-editors of the Oxford Poets Anthologies from 1999 to 2002.
Lee is also known for her reviews, including for The Guardian , [11] The New York Review of Books , [12] and her work in the media. From 1982 to 1986, she presented Channel Four's first books programme, Book Four, and she contributes regularly to Front Row and other radio arts programmes. [5] She chaired the Judges for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction in 2006, and has judged many other literary prizes. She has served on the literature advisory panels of the Arts Council and the British Council.
In writing her major biography of Tom Stoppard (2020), Lee was granted unprecedented access to the playwright's papers, letters and diaries, and conducted extensive interviews with key figures such as Felicity Kendal, Trevor Nunn, and Stoppard himself. [13] [14]
It was announced in 2021 that Chatto & Windus had signed a deal with Lee for her biography of writer Anita Brookner. [15]
Lee is married to Professor John Barnard, Professor Emeritus of the University of Leeds. [16]
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Willa Sibert Cather was an American writer known for her novels of life on the Great Plains, including O Pioneers!, The Song of the Lark, and My Ántonia. In 1923, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours, a novel set during World War I.
Penelope Mary Fitzgerald was a Booker Prize-winning novelist, poet, essayist and biographer from Lincoln, England. In 2008 The Times listed her among "the 50 greatest British writers since 1945". The Observer in 2012 placed her final novel, The Blue Flower, among "the ten best historical novels". A.S. Byatt called her, "Jane Austen’s nearest heir for precision and invention."
Dame Felicity Ann Emwhyla Lott, is an English soprano.
Dame Linda Jane Colley is an expert on British, imperial and global history from 1700. She is currently Shelby M. C. Davis 1958 Professor of History at Princeton University and a long-term fellow in history at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in Uppsala. She previously held chairs at Yale University and at the London School of Economics. Her work frequently approaches the past from inter-disciplinary perspectives.
Dame Penelope Margaret Lively is a British writer of fiction for both children and adults. Lively has won both the Booker Prize and the Carnegie Medal for British children's books.
Drue Heinz, DBE was a British-born American actress, philanthropist, arts patron, and socialite. She was the publisher of the literary magazine The Paris Review, co-founded Ecco Press, founded literary retreats and endowed the Drue Heinz Literature Prize among others. She was married to H. J. Heinz II, president of Heinz.
Dame Marina Sarah Warner, is an English historian, mythographer, art critic, novelist and short story writer. She is known for her many non-fiction books relating to feminism and myth. She has written for many publications, including The London Review of Books, the New Statesman, Sunday Times, and Vogue. She has been a visiting professor, given lectures and taught on the faculties of many universities.
Dame Frances Anne Cairncross, is a British economist, journalist and academic. She is a senior fellow at the School of Public Policy, UCLA.
Dame Gillian Patricia Kempster Beer, is a British literary critic and academic. She was President of Clare Hall from 1994 to 2001, and King Edward VII Professor of English Literature at the University of Cambridge from 1994 to 2002.
Dame Kay Elizabeth Davies is a British geneticist. She is Dr Lee's Professor of Anatomy at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Hertford College, Oxford. She is director of the Medical Research Council (MRC) functional genetics unit, a governor of the Wellcome Trust, a director of the Oxford Centre for Gene Function, and a patron and Senior Member of Oxford University Scientific Society. Her research group has an international reputation for work on Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD). In the 1980s, she developed a test which allowed for the screening of foetuses whose mothers have a high risk of carrying DMD.
Dame Bridget Margaret Ogilvie, is an Australian and British scientist.
Dame Jean Olwen Thomas, is a Welsh biochemist, former Master of St Catharine's College, Cambridge, and Chancellor of Swansea University.
"Ardessa" is a short story by Willa Cather. It was first published in Century in May 1918.
Dame Janet Maria Vaughan, Mrs Gourlay, was a British physiologist, academic, and academic administrator. She researched haematology and radiation pathology. From 1945 to 1967, she served as Principal of Somerville College, Oxford.
Alison Light is a writer, critic and independent scholar. She is the author of five books to date. In 2020 A Radical Romance, was awarded the Pen Ackerley prize, the only prize for memoir in the UK. Common People: The History of an English Family (2014) was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson prize. She has held a number of academic posts and is currently an Honorary Fellow in History and English at Pembroke College, Oxford. She is also an Honorary Professor in the Department of English, University College, London and an Honorary Professorial Fellow in the Department of English, Edinburgh University. She is a founding member of the Raphael Samuel Archive and History Centre in London.
David Hugh Porter was an American academic and the fifth president of Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York, serving from 1987 to 1999. Porter was a professor and lecturer of classics and music, starting his career at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, where he taught from 1962 to 1987.
The Gate of Angels is a 1990 historical novel by the British author Penelope Fitzgerald. It is set in 1912 at St Angelicus, a fictional Cambridge University college. The novel was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
Maria Fitzgerald is a British neuroscientist who is a professor in the Department of Neuroscience at University College London.
Dame Helen Jean Sutherland Fraser, is a British executive and publisher. From 2010 to 2016, she was the chief executive officer of the Girls' Day School Trust. She previously worked in publishing, and was an editor then managing director at a number of publishers including Heinemann and Penguin UK.
