- Hermione Lee
Hermione Lee, CBE (b.
February 29 ,1948 ) [Day of birth from "Hermione Lee" in "Contemporary Authors Online", Gale, entry updateJuly 17 ,2003 ] is President Elect ofWolfson College, Oxford and was lately Goldsmiths' Professor of English Literature in theUniversity of Oxford and Professorial Fellow of New College. She is a Fellow of theBritish Academy and of theRoyal Society of Literature .Biography
Hermione Lee grew up in
London where her father was a GP. She was educated at theLycée Français Charles de Gaulle ,City of London School for Girls , andQueen's College, London . She took a first-class degree in English Literature atSt Hilda's College, Oxford in 1968 and an MPhil atSt Cross College, Oxford in 1970. She has taught at the College of William and Mary in Virginia, at theUniversity of Liverpool (where she was given an Honorary DLitt in 2002) and at theUniversity of York , from 1977 to 1998, where she had 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.Membership
She is a Fellow of the
British Academy , a Fellow of theRoyal Society of Literature , an Honorary Fellow of St Hilda's andSt Cross College, Oxford , and a member of theAthenaeum Club . In 2003 she was appointed a Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (CBE) for services to literature and became a Foreign Honorary Member of theAmerican Academy of Arts and Sciences . In the USA, she has been a visiting teaching fellow at the Beinecke Library atYale 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 University of Indiana at Bloomington, and the Mel and Lois Tukman Fellow of theNew York Public Library 's Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers in 2004-5.Writing
Hermione 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), a critical biography of the American novelistWilla Cather , "Willa Cather: A Life Saved Up" (1989, reissued in a revised edition by Virago in 2008), and a major biography ofVirginia Woolf (1996), which won the British Academy Rose Mary Crawshay prize and was named as one of theNew York Times Book Review 's best books of 1997. She has also published a collection of essays on biography and autobiography, "Body Parts: Essays on Life-Writing" (2005), and a biography of "Edith Wharton ", published to considerable acclaim in 2007 byChatto & Windus and Knopf. She has edited and introduced numerous editions and anthologies, of Kipling, Trollope,Virginia Woolf ,Stevie Smith ,Elizabeth Bowen ,Willa Cather ,Eudora Welty , andPenelope Fitzgerald . She was one of the co-editors of the Oxford Poets Anthologies from 1999 to 2002.Hermione Lee is also well-known for her reviewing, most recently in
The Guardian , and her work in the media. From 1982 to 1986 she presentedChannel Four 's first books programme, Book Four, and she contributes regularly to Front Row and other radio arts programmes. She was Chair of the Judges for theMan 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 theBritish Council .Personal life
She is married to Professor John Barnard, Professor Emeritus of the University of Leeds.
Partial bibliography
*"The Novels of Virginia Woolf" (1977)
*"Elizabeth Bowen: An Estimation" (1981)
*"Philip Roth" (1982)
*"Willa Cather: Double Lives" (1989)
*"Virginia Woolf" (1997)
*"Body Parts" (2002)
*"Edith Wharton" (2007)References
External links
*Hermione Lee Website: [http://www.hermionelee.com www.hermionelee.com]
*Wolfson Presidency: [http://www.wolfson.ox.ac.uk/newpresident/]
*contemporary writers|id=139
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