A Life

Penelope Fitzgerald

Intimate, perceptive, critically acute, funny and moving, this is the first full biography of one of the finest English novelists of the last century.

Excellent... [Hermione] Lee is a perfect choice as Fitzgerald's biographer. She has done a superb job, capturing an elusive personality and a complex, sometimes rather harrowing story.

Lee elucidates the depth of [Fitzgerald's] achievement, and ties it enthrallingly to a life and personality more complex and difficult than anyone imagined. In a perfect literary biography, Lee plumbs the creative mind beneath that persona, tracing the metamorphosis of messy experience into crystalline art.

Brilliant and passionate...a haunting tale of blighted hope, personal tragedy and rare, late fulfilment. Thanks to this sympathetic biography, [Fitzgerald's] afterlife shows signs of becoming finally blessed with understanding, admiration and respect.

Admirable and perceptive... Hermione Lee non-judgmentally excavates this extraordinary life. Her biography is very good indeed

A worthy monument to one of the finest English novelists of the second half of the 20th century

Adroitly executed and meticulously researched... insightful... Ms Lee's shrewd examination makes this a riveting biography

Lee's absorbing biography is the story of a late starter... [She] is partisan in her project: she means to expose a truth she is certain of -- that Fitzgerald is "a great English writer". Her feat is to have woven an involving narrative out of such a skeletal life....Excellent....

This book will hold insights and treats for any admirer of [Fitzgerald's] fiction, and recruit converts to this reticent, witty, ferocious champion of the utterly downtrodden.

Her book is in the very best tradition of critical literary biography. Phenomenally well researched and elegantly written, with a fine, dynamic fluency and lucid understanding, this is a very good biography indeed.

This elegant, richly researched biography tells a tale of misfortunes borne with dignity, humour and courage, and finally of quiet triumphs

Lee’s book has had more influence on my reading than anything else this year

A compelling account of the life and work of Penelope Fitzgerald

A masterly discussion of the work of that fine novelist and an illuminating account of the life of a complex and elusive person

A big and richly satisfying literary biography, from an artist in the form. It will send you back to the subject’s own piquant and elusive novels

The book I’d most like someone to give me for Christmas… in fact, no, I don’t think I can wait till Christmas

Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life by Hermione Lee is the literary biography of the year, an extraordinary portrait of an English literary life.

A wonderful labour of extraction…Fitzgerald's life overspills with untold dramas, which Lee convincingly demonstrates to be the undertow of Fitzgerald’s remarkable fiction

With this superb, painstaking study of Penelope Fitzgerald… Lee here combines a deft light touch of humanity with her peerless critical eye to bring this British literary treasure back into the limelight

A revelation, brilliantly demonstrating the undemure existence of this widely admired novelist: a louche Irish husband, debt, a poverty-stricken life on sinking barges and council flats lie behind a façade of mild English eccentricity and powerfully original (often very un-English) work. It reads like a Fitzgerald novel

[Fitzgerald’s] story is a gift to the literary biographer, her oeuvre is manageably compact, intensely personal

This book is in part a period piece about literary London in the Eighties and Nineties and a justification and rebooting of the lavish praise Fitzgerald received then

The second half of the book is deliriously entertaining… [Lee's] intense, close-up analyses of each book would have thrilled Fitzgerald

Lee displays all the tact and reticence for which her subject was well-known

A full and detailed life of the finest English writer since the Second World War

[An] expert, elegant biography... Alongside deft and sensitive literary criticism, Lee identifies the seeds of many of Fitzgerald's novels

In her career, the novelist Penelope Fitzgerald was saved and supported by the devotion of her publishers and now, in reputation, she is rewarded by a superb biographer who is intrigued by the ambivalence of "her tragic view of life and humorous style"

Hermione Lee's biography of Penelope Fitzgerald delighted us

This is an exhaustively researched, sympathetic insight into an enigmatic writer

Penelope Fitzgerald is an admirable biography, and one which has evidently been thoroughly researched down to the last detail. Lee excels at her craft, and it is no wonder that the subject of this biography so admired her. Whilst reviewing Lee's earlier book, Virginia Woolf, Fitzgerald wrote: 'Lee's book is not only very good, but very necessary'. The same can surely be said here

This book is that rare thing: a biography that does not disappoint

A consummate piece of work, and a thoroughly absorbing account of a most unusual, highly gifted woman

A very readable and honest account of the incomprehensible facts

Thank goodness…for Hermione Lee… This biography was a wholly necessary task

Lee has done a superb job of capturing the elusive personality behind some of the greatest novels of the late 20th century

A thoroughly absorbing account of a most unusual, highly gifted woman

This is a masterpiece worthy of its subject

[A] masterful biography. Simply sit back and watch an extraordinary life unfold

Hermione Lee is a biographer, critic, and teacher of literature. Her previous books include the internationally acclaimed biography, Virginia Woolf ('One of the most impressive biographies of the decade: moving, eloquent, powerful', Financial Times) and Edith Wharton ('A feat of exhaustive research... a glorious biography', Independent on Sunday), as well as books on Elizabeth Bowen, Willa Cather and Philip Roth. Her collection of essays on life-writing, Body Parts, was published in 2005, and her Biography: A Very Short Introduction in 2009. She is the President of Wolfson College Oxford. In 2013 she was made a Dame for services to Literary Scholarship. She lives in Oxford and Yorkshire.

Winner of the James Tait Black Prize for Biography 2014 
Winner of the Plutarch Award for Best Biography 
New York Times Book Review’s 10 Best Books of the Year 
 
Penelope Fitzgerald (1916–2000) was a great English writer, who would never have described herself in such grand terms. Her novels were short, spare masterpieces, self-concealing, oblique and subtle. She won the Booker Prize for her novel Offshore in 1979, and her last work, The Blue Flower, was acclaimed as a work of genius. The early novels drew on her own experiences – a boat on the Thames in the 1960s; the BBC in war time; a failing bookshop in Suffolk; an eccentric stage-school. The later ones opened out to encompass historical worlds which, magically, she seemed to possess entirely: Russia before the Revolution; post-war Italy; Germany in the time of the Romantic writer Novalis. 
 
Fitzgerald’s life is as various and as cryptic as her fiction. It spans most of the twentieth century, and moves from a Bishop’s Palace to a sinking barge, from a demanding intellectual family to hardship and poverty, from a life of teaching and obscurity to a blaze of renown. She was first published at sixty and became famous at eighty. This is a story of lateness, patience and persistence: a private form of heroism. 
 
Loved and admired, and increasingly recognised as one of the outstanding novelists of her time, she remains, also, mysterious and intriguing. She liked to mislead people with a good imitation of an absent-minded old lady, but under that scatty front were a steel-sharp brain and an imagination of wonderful reach. This brilliant account – by a biographer whom Fitzgerald herself admired – pursues her life, her writing, and her secret self, with fascinated interest.

Edith Wharton

A rich and powerful new life of a great novelist. The first biography by a British woman writer, it overturns the accepted view, displaying her as a tough, erotically brave, startlingly modern writer. Much more than the biography of Wharton for our generation - it is a touchstone in the art of the biographer, a must for everyone who cares about the period.

An exhaustive record of the career of a brilliant and prolific writer.

Adding impressive depth and nuance to the received portrait of Wharton, Lee's biography excels in its discussions of her writing

Painstaking and elegant... One of this book's great pleasures is Lee's discussion of Wharton's work

A feat of exhaustive research...finely tuned to Wharton's creative achievement. This is a glorious biography

[A] majestically weighty autobiography as meticulous, exhaustive and exhausting in scope and scale as its subject

Hermione Lee's previous books include the internationally acclaimed biography Virginia Woolf, a collection of essays on life-writing, Body Parts, and a study of Elizabeth Bowen. She has written on many American authors, from Willa Cather to Philip Roth. She is a well-known reviewer and broadcaster, and, in 2006, Chair of the judges for the Man-Booker Prize. She is the first woman Goldsmiths' Professor of English at Oxford University, a Fellow of New College Oxford, of the British Academy and of the Royal Society of Literature. She was awarded a CBE in 2003 for services to literature.

The name 'Edith Wharton' conjures up 'Gilded Age' New York, in all its snobbery and ruthlessness - the world of The Age of Innocence and The House of Mirth. But this definitive biography by Hermione Lee overturns the stereotype. This Edith Wharton is not the genteel, nostalgic chronicler of a vanished age but a fiercely modern woman, writing of sex and incest, love and war - a woman of passionate conviction and conflicting ambitions and desires. 
 
Born in 1862 during the Civil War, Wharton broke away from her wealthy background. She travelled adventurously in Europe, eventually settling in Paris: during the First World War she committed herself to war-work, and lived in France, her 'second country' until her death in 1937. She created fabulous homes in New England and in France, and her life was filled with remarkable friends, including Henry James, Bernard Berenson, Aldous Huxley and Kenneth Clark. She ran her professional life with fierce energy, but she also had her secrets, including a passionate mid-life love-affair, recorded in a coded diary. She was unhappily married, childless, and divorced, and knew loneliness and anguish. Her brilliant, disturbing fiction shows her deep understanding of the longing and struggle in women's lives. 
 
This masterly new biography draws on new material and delves into every aspect of Wharton's extraordinary life-story. It shifts the emphasis towards Europe, placing her in her social context and her history. In particular, it shows in fascinating detail how she worked and what lies at the heart of her magnificent and subtle books.

Essays on Life-Writing

Body Parts

Brilliant, readable, lively essays on the problems of reading and writing biography.

Elegant, level-headed tidbits of higher journalism and light scholarship

In its cleverness, intimacy and verve, Lee's own work is utterly engaging - perfect material in which to lose yourself between the sheets

Enthralling...This is a superb, intriguing volume of literary curios

Everything Hermione Lee, who both writes and teaches biography, has written about the states of the biographer's art in recent years is worth re-reading

A pleasure to read: clever, witty, sceptical and sensitive

Contains many incidental pleasures and fascinating facts

Hermione Lee's previous books include the biographical studies Elizabeth Bowen and Willa Cather, the internationally acclaimed biography Virginia Woolf, and Edith Wharton, longlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize. She is a well-known reviewer and broadcaster, and, in 2006, Chair of the judges for the Man Booker Prize. She is the first woman Goldsmiths' Professor of English at Oxford University, a Fellow of New College, Oxford, of the British Academy and of the Royal Society of Literature. She was awarded a CBE in 2003 for services to literature.

As readers, we seem to be increasingly fascinated by studies of individual lives. In this timely, unusual and exhilarating collection Hermione Lee is concerned in different ways with approaches to 'life-writing': the relation of biography to fiction and history; the exploration of writers' lives in connection with their works; the new and changing ways in which biographies, memoirs, diaries and autobiographies can be discussed. 
 
As the title suggests, she also unravels the complex links between physical, sensual details and the 'body' of a work. 'Shelley's Heart and Pepys' Lobsters', for example, deals with myths, contested objects and things that go missing, while 'Jane Austen Faints' takes five varied accounts of the same dramatic moment to ask how biography deals with the private lives of famous women, a theme taken up in 'Virginia Woolf's Nose', on the way that the author's life-stories have been transformed into fiction and film. 
 
Rich, diverting and entertaining, these brilliant studies by a leading critic and internationally acclaimed biographer raise profound and intriguing issues about every aspect of writing, and reading, a life.

Virginia Woolf

Thirty years on from first publication, this comprehensive and illuminating life of Virginia Woolf, from one of our most celebrated biographers, is a classic in its own right.

The landmark study of Woolf and her world, a classic of contemporary life-writing. 
 
'A lasting, and even a great book' - Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours 
 
Hermione Lee's Virginia Woolf is a great writer, a subversive thinker, and a vital figure for our times. Lee tells a richly-detailed life story, and asks crucial questions of her subject, probing the impact of Woolf's childhood, her mental illness and suicide, her marriage and love affairs, her prejudices and obsessions. 
 
This vivid, close-up portrait is replete with primary sources which destabilise received ideas about this iconic figure. It is a writer's life, illustrating how the concerns of her work arise and develop, and a political life, which establishes Woolf as a radically sceptical, subversive, courageous feminist. Incorporating newly discovered sources and illustrated with photos and drawings never used before, this biography is a revelation - informed, intelligent and moving. 
 
'An outstanding achievement...superb' Selena Hastings, Sunday Telegraph 
 
'Impressive...eloquent...powerful,' Financial Times

It is a lasting, and even a great, book. These are not terms one gets to use often, or should ever use lightly

Lee's book is not only very good, but very necessary

One of the most impressive biographies of the decade: moving, eloquent, powerful

Hermione Lee sees Virginia Woolf afresh, in her historical setting and as a vital figure for our times. Her book moves freely between a richly detailed life-story and new attempts to understand crucial questions - the impact of her childhood, the cause and nature of her madness and suicide, the truth about her marriage, her feelings for women, her prejudices and obsessions. This is a vivid, close-up portrait, returning to primary sources, and showing Woolf as occupying a distinct, even uneasy position with 'Bloomsbury'. It is a writer's life, illustrating how the concerns of her work arise and develop, and a political life, which establishes Woolf as a radically sceptical, subversive, courageous feminist. Incorporating newly discovered sources and illustrated with photos and drawings never used before, this biography is a revelation -informed, intelligent and moving.

Hermione Lee

‘A rich and fascinating book, beautifully written, which grasps the contradictions of Brookner’s character and work’

Art and Life

The groundbreaking biography of Booker Prize-winning novelist and art historian Anita Brookner, from one of our leading literary biographers. Hermione Lee reveals the full story of a brilliant, idiosyncratic and complex woman and goes deep into Anita Brookner’s marvellous work in all its stylishness and daring. 
 
Born in south London in 1928, Brookner came from a family of middle-class, Polish-Jewish immigrants. Her parents were anxious and unhappy. Until she was well into her thirties, she nursed her invalid mother with a painful mixture of love and resentment. She would have liked a marriage and children; instead, she lived alone and became a great writer of solitude, self-knowledge and survival. 
 
For many years she worked at the Courtauld Institute, teaching French Romanticism in art, and influencing generations of students. In her fifties she began to write fiction: her first novel was the wryly titled A Start in Life. In 1984, she won the Booker Prize for Hotel du Lac; after that, a novel appeared almost every year until her eighties. 
 
In her lifetime Brookner was seen as an object of wonder and fascination. She was a formidable and inspiring teacher, an enormously knowledgeable, witty and perceptive art historian and critic, and a novelist like no other. Her extraordinary fictions of heroic solitude, romantic passion, longing and lethal social comedy, written with elegance and impeccable control, gained her a devoted following. But she also attracted hostility and bafflement, often from readers challenged by the unsentimental realism of her fierce, strange and moving books.

Hermione Lee

Praise for Anita Brookner

‘A rich and fascinating book, beautifully written, which grasps the contradictions of Brookner’s character and work’

Books by Hermione Lee

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