Hermione Lee - Writing

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 novelist Willa Cather, Willa Cather: A Life Saved Up (1989, reissued in a revised edition by Virago in 2008); and a major biography of Virginia Woolf (1996), which won the British Academy Rose Mary Crawshay Prize and was named as one of the New York Times Book Review's best books of 1997.

Lee 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 mixed reviews in 2007 by Chatto & 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, and Penelope 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 reviews, most recently in The Guardian, 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. She was Chair of 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.