Elizabeth Bowen

HERMIONE LEE

Biographies & Memoirs

Vintage

Virginia Woolf

A rich and powerful new life of the great novelist. It overturns the accepted view, displaying her as a tough, erotically brave, startlingly modern writer. 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. Her 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. Born in 1862, Wharton broke away from her wealthy background. She travelled adventurously in Europe, eventually settling 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. Unhappily married, childless and divorced, she knew loneliness and anguish. Her brilliant and disturbing fiction shows her deep understanding of the longing and struggle in women’s lives. In this masterly new biography, Hermione Lee shifts the emphasis to Europe, placing Wharton in her social context and history. It shows in fascinating detail how she worked and what lies at the heart of her magnificent books.

Edith Wharton

Vintage Books

"A biography wholly worthy of the brilliant woman it chronicles. . . . It rediscovers Virginia Woolf afresh." --The Philadelphia Inquirer While Virginia Woolf--one of our century's most brilliant and mercurial writers--has had no shortage of biographers, none has seemed as naturally suited to the task as Hermione Lee. Subscribing to Virginia Woolf's own belief in the fluidity and elusiveness of identity, Lee comes at her subject from a multitude of perspectives, producing a richly layered portrait of the writer and the woman that leaves all of her complexities and contradictions intact. Such issues as sexual abuse, mental illness, and suicide are brought into balance with the immensity of her literary achievement, her heroic commitment to her work, her generosity and wit, and her sanity and strength. It is not often that biography offers the satisfactions of great fiction--but this is clearly what Hermione Lee has achieved. Accessible, intelligent, and deeply pleasurable to read, her Virginia Woolf will undoubtedly take its place as the standard biography for years to come. "One of the most impressive biographies of the decade: moving, eloquent, powerful as both literary and social history." --Financial Times "The most distinguished study of Woolf yet." --The New Republic

Arts & Literature

A selection from the GOLDEN TREASURY,which has remained the most famous poetry anthology since publication in 1861.

The Secret Self : Short Stories by Women

Phoenix (an Imprint of The Orion

Main blurb (for internal use only – CHECK BEFORE USING IN PRINTED PUBLICITY): As the annotated chapter headings below show, the proposal is to explore the origins and development of the genre, closing in the last two chapters with current controversies. These centre round struggles to face those who are ′against biography′ and to present biography as not just a respectable but an important, and finally a theorised subject of academic literary study. 1. THE BIOGRAPHY CHANNEL Why do we like biography so much? Account for the current popularity of biography (see "the biography channel" on American television); our need for role models, our longing to see inside people′s private lives, our mixture of prurience and puritanism, sensation–seeking and quickness to judge. Whose lives do we want? Why do certain histories and certain periods (Bloomsbury, for instance) arouse so much fascination and so much dislike? What does the "biography boom" say about the way we live now? 2. SAINTS AND SINNERS How does biography come into being? The roots and traditions of Western biography; its foundation in hagiography and exemplary lives. The interruption of that tradition with Johnsonian truthfulness and Boswellian fidelity and anecdotalism. The settling into modes of public acceptability, praise, celebration, censorship, and the division of public and private in Victorian lives. The masculine comradeship exemplified in many of these lives. 3. FEET OF CLAY The coming apart of the Victorian model of biography with the late 19th century scandals of Froude and Carlyle, Brown′s life of Symonds, and Strachey′s Eminent Victorians. Satire, debunking, miniaturism and impressionism as reactions against the Victorian monuments. Woolf′s Orlando as a fantasy–parody of conventional biography; her troubled, radical writings on biography. 4. THE GOLDEN AGE How British biography was refurbished and transformed by the big biographies, starting in the 60s, of Holroyd, Glendinning, Holmes, Spurling, Motion, Ackroyd: how do we define these freelance biographers, what techniques used, why so successful? What relation to biographical traditions of the past? How do they use evidence and what styles do they use; how do their biographies relate to fiction? 5. OBSCURE LIVES How the angle in biography keeps recurrently shifting away or aside from major figures, heroes and heroines; how biography can attend to minor characters, low–status figures, walk–on parts, characters who do not think their own lives worth writing, groups rather than individuals, servants rather than masters. What do such lives tell us about the politics and social class of biography? 6. WRITING A WOMAN′S LIFE How have women′s biographies differed from men; have women′s lives required a different kind of approach, and is that still the case? Do women biographers (Elizabeth Gaskell on Charlotte Bronte, for instance) pay attention to different aspects of a life? What does feminist biography need to incorporate; why should biography and feminism need each other? 7. DEATHBEDS How do lives finish? Why do we want to give meaning to deaths? Why do we need endings? How can the death of a subject be interpreted? Where should it be placed in the life–story? What follows death in a biography? This meditation on biography and death is a way of considering what biographical practises have to tell us about the way we think about the shape of a life and what we desire from biography. 8. AGAINST BIOGRAPHY Why have so many novelists and poets written against biographers, from Edith Wharton and James Joyce to Philip Larkin and Julian Barnes? What is the threat biography poses to the creative writer? Why does biography have a bad name? And why should so many biographers currently be jumping ship and protesting against the limitation and falsifications of the genre? 9. EXAMINED LIVES Biography has until recently been relatively untheorised, unlike autobiography, and has remained outside the academy. This is beginning to change, and more theoretical/analytical books about biography are beginning to be written; biography is becoming a more selfconscious art, and is finding its way onto academic courses. Why should this be happening now, and what does it mean for the future of biography?

Biography: The Facts

History

Blackwell*publishers

With epic scope and a rich use of detail, Hermione Lee has created a miraculously evocative portrait that lets us know as never before how Virginia Woolf looked, how she sounded, how she dressed and behaved, and how she wrote. She shows us a brave, powerfully intelligent woman who suffered from a terrifying chronic illness and wrestled with the contradictions of her own character.

VIRGINIA WOOLF

Chatto and Windus

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. Other essays tease out different approaches, like that on Philip and Edmund Gosse, which enquires into the opposition between literary and scientific lives, or the fascinating 'Reading in Bed', which explores women's formative childhood reading, and how it enters into their adult writing. The subjects range from T. S. Eliot to J. M. Coetzee, from May Sinclair and Rosamond Lehmann to Eudora Welty and Brian Moore. 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.

Body Parts : Essays on Life-Writing

Community & Culture

Random House]

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by HERMIONE LEE. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by HERMIONE LEE

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by HERMIONE LEE. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Elizabeth Bowen

Virginia Woolf

Edith Wharton

Virginia Woolf

The Secret Self : Short Stories by Women

Biography: The Facts

VIRGINIA WOOLF

Edith Wharton

Body Parts : Essays on Life-Writing