Hermione Lee Knihy

Hermione Lee sees Virginia Woolf afresh, in her historical setting and as a vital figure for our times. 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.

A perfect match of writer and subject, one of our most brilliant biographers explores the life of a towering literary figure with his cooperation and access to unseen material. Known for his narrative inventiveness and keen attention to language, Tom Stoppard deftly incorporates art, science, history, politics, and philosophy across various genres, including theater, radio, film, TV, journalism, and fiction. His acclaimed works, such as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, The Real Thing, Arcadia, The Coast of Utopia, and Shakespeare in Love, continue to resonate with audiences. Stoppard's life is equally captivating; born in Czechoslovakia, he escaped the Nazis with his mother and spent his early years in Singapore and India before arriving in England at eight. Forgoing university, he launched a remarkable career and formed friendships with a diverse array of notable figures, including Peter O'Toole, Harold Pinter, Stephen Spielberg, Mick Jagger, and Vaclav Havel. Identifying as a "bounced Czech," he was later surprised to discover his Jewish heritage and the relatives lost in the Holocaust—secrets his mother had kept from him. The biographer's in-depth analysis weaves Stoppard's life and work into a vivid, insightful portrait of an extraordinary man.

Intimate, perceptive, critically acute, funny, and moving, this biography explores the life of one of the finest English novelists of the last century, Penelope Fitzgerald (1916-2000). A great writer who would never describe herself as such, her novels are short, spare masterpieces that are self-concealing and subtle. She won the Booker Prize for Offshore in 1979, and her last work, The Blue Flower, was hailed as genius. Her early novels drew from personal experiences, such as a boat on the Thames in the 1960s and a failing bookshop in Suffolk, while her later works ventured into historical realms, including pre-Revolution Russia and post-war Italy. Fitzgerald's life mirrored the complexity of her fiction, spanning the twentieth century and shifting from a Bishop's Palace to a sinking barge, and from an intellectual family to hardship. First published at sixty and achieving fame at eighty, her story embodies lateness, patience, and a unique form of heroism. Despite being loved and admired, she remained mysterious, often presenting herself as an absent-minded old lady, concealing a sharp intellect and a rich imagination. This brilliant account, penned by a biographer Fitzgerald admired, delves into her life, writing, and enigmatic self with fascination.

A Passionate Apprentice comprises the first years of Virginia Woolf's Journal - from 1879 to 1909. Beginning in early January, when Woolf was almost fifteen, the pages open at a time when she was slowly recovering from a period of madness following her mother's death in May 1895. Between this January and the autumn of 1904, Woolf would suffer the deaths of her half-sister and of her father, and survive a summer of madness and suicidal depression. Behind the loss and confusion, however, and always near the surface of her writing is a constructive force at work - a powerful impulse towards health. It was an urge, through writing, to bring order and continuity out of chaos. Putting things into words and giving them deliberate expression had the effect of restoring reality to much that might otherwise have remained insubstantial. This early chronicle represents the beginning of the future Virginia Woolf's apprenticeship as a novelist. These pages show that rare instance when a writer of great importance leaves behind not only the actual documents of an apprenticeship, but also a biographical record of that momentous period as well. In Woolf's words, 'Here is a volume of fairly acute life (the first really lived year of my life).'

Shot through with Stoppard's voice, and illuminating all his plays, Lee's gripping narrative draws on unprecedented access to archive material, interviews and long conversations with Stoppard himself.

Designed for both general readers and students of English literature at all levels, this edition of Trollope's novel contains an introduction, notes and comments on the text.

Biographer Lee gives us a new Edith Wharton--tough, startlingly modern, as brilliant and complex as her fiction. Born in 1862, Wharton escaped the suffocating fate of the well-born female, traveled adventurously in Europe and eventually settled in France. She developed a forceful literary professionalism and thrived in a luminous society that included Bernard Berenson, Aldous Huxley and most famously Henry James, who here emerges more as peer than as master. Wharton's life was fed by nonliterary enthusiasms as well: houses and gardens, relief efforts during the Great War, and the culture of the Old World, which she never tired of absorbing. Yet intimacy eluded her: unhappily married and childless, her one brush with passion came and went in midlife, an affair intimately recounted here. Lee interweaves Wharton's life with the evolution of her writing, the full scope of which shows her to be far more daring than her stereotype as lapidarian chronicler of the Gilded Age.--From publisher description

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

Hermione Lee is one of the leading literary biographers in the English-speaking world, the author of widely acclaimed lives of Edith Wharton and Virginia Woolf. Now, in this Very Short Introduction, Lee provides a magnificent look at the genre in which she is an undisputed master--the art of biography. Here Lee considers the cultural and historical background of different types of biographies, looks at the factors that affect biographers, and asks whether there are different strategies, ethics, and principles required for writing about one person compared to another. She also discusses contemporary biographical publications and considers what kind of "lives" are the most popular and in demand. And along the way, she answers such questions as why do certain people and historical events arouse so much interest? How can biographies be compared with history and works of fiction? Does a biography need to be true? Is it acceptable to omit or conceal things? Does the biographer need topersonally know the subject? Must a biographer be subjective?About the Combining authority with wit, accessibility, and style, Very Short Introductions offer an introduction to some of life's most interesting topics. Written by experts for the newcomer, they demonstrate the finest contemporary thinking about the central problems and issues in hundreds of key topics, from philosophy to Freud, quantum theory to Islam.