Hermione Lee is the author of biographies of Virginia Woolf and Edith Wharton. She teaches at Oxford, where she is president of Wolfson College.
Wangling: Katherine Anne Porter
Hermione Lee, 12 February 2009
It is 1912, and Miranda Gay, one of Katherine Anne Porter's versions of her younger self, is travelling to a family reunion in South Texas, in the country between Austin and San Antonio. She has made a rash early marriage and alienated herself from her family. She talks to an elderly woman cousin on the train, who bursts out: 'Ah, the family … the whole hideous institution...
Collected Stories and Other Writings
by Katherine Anne Porter, edited by Darlene Harbour Unrue.
It is 1912, and Miranda Gay, one of Katherine Anne Porter's versions of her younger self, is travelling to a family reunion in South Texas, in the country between Austin and San Antonio....
I like you: Boston Marriage
Hermione Lee, 24 May 2007
In 1852, Elizabeth Barrett Browning met the expatriate American actress Charlotte Cushman (famous for her trouser roles) and her companion Matilda Hays, a writer and feminist. They had 'made vows of celibacy and of eternal attachment to each other – they live together, dress alike,' Barrett Browning wrote to her sister. 'It is a female marriage.' She added that...
Between Women: Friendship, Desire and Marriage in Victorian England
by Sharon Marcus.
In 1852, Elizabeth Barrett Browning met the expatriate American actress Charlotte Cushman (famous for her trouser roles) and her companion Matilda Hays, a writer and feminist. They had...
All Reputation: Eliza and Clara
Hermione Lee, 17 October 2002
Both these outstanding women novelists have decided, with deliberate and rewarding feminist intent, to resuscitate and make central the lives of women whose stories have been overshadowed by the men they spent their lives with. Both have placed so-called women's subject-matter – domestic details, clothes, female bodies, sexuality and pleasure, pregnancy and childbirth – at...
The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch
by Anne Enright.
by Janice Galloway.
Both these outstanding women novelists have decided, with deliberate and rewarding feminist intent, to resuscitate and make central the lives of women whose stories have been overshadowed by the...
Uneasy Guest: Coetzee in London
Hermione Lee, 11 July 2002
By comparison with the acclaim for Disgrace, and the respectful reception of Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life, Youth has been met here with some disappointed and negative reviews ('a tortuous exercise in intellectual introspection, and not much else'; 'as fiction it is so interior and cerebral, it fails to engage'; 'not wholly satisfactory as either novel or...
by J.M. Coetzee.
By comparison with the acclaim for Disgrace, and the respectful reception of Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life, Youth has been met here with some disappointed and negative reviews ('a...
Gatsby of the Boulevards: Morton Fullerton
Hermione Lee, 8 March 2001
In the spring of 1907, a few weeks after Edith Wharton had met Morton Fullerton in Paris, she described him to a mutual friend as 'very intelligent, but slightly mysterious, I think'. Eight years later, by which time her passionate affair with Fullerton was long over, Henry James, in one of his last letters to her, confirmed her first thoughts about the man who had fascinated them...
Mysteries of Paris: The Quest for Morton Fullerton
by Marion Mainwaring.
In the spring of 1907, a few weeks after Edith Wharton had met Morton Fullerton in Paris, she described him to a mutual friend as 'very intelligent, but slightly mysterious, I think'....
Firm Lines
Hermione Lee, 17 November 1983
Elizabeth Hardwick's terms for the mind at work are revealing. In an essay called 'Domestic Manners' which begins with the question 'How do we live today?' she reminds us of the duplicity and elusiveness of styles. Just as they seem to 'the defining imagination' to look like solid historical facts, they shift and collapse. In 'The Sense of the Present', which does for the contemporary American novel what 'Domestic Manners' does for styles, she finds the 'honourable' quality of (some) modern fiction to be 'the intelligence that questions the shape of life at every point'.
Bartleby in Manhattan, and Other Essays
by Elizabeth Hardwick.
Elizabeth Hardwick's terms for the mind at work are revealing. In an essay called 'Domestic Manners' which begins with the question 'How do we live today?' she...
Cooee!
I am sorry that my ex-graduate student Deborah Friedell, now on the staff of the LRB, was distracted from Fiona Shaw's magnificent performance as Winnie in Happy Days at the National Theatre by a Whartonian social anxiety about whether to greet me or not from the row behind (LRB, 8 March). And I'm glad that I did spot her at the end of the play and that we exchanged a friendly wave. But...
Pieces about Hermione Lee in the LRB
Splashed with Stars: In Stoppardian Fashion
Susannah Clapp, 16 December 2021
Tom Stoppard has talked of putting on Englishness 'like a coat' when he arrived as an eight-year-old. A more sentimental biographer might have colluded in the suggestion that the coat could...
In the Potato Patch: Penelope Fitzgerald
Jenny Turner, 19 December 2013
Penelope Fitzgerald was 62 when she won the Booker, a widow and accustomed to making do on very little
Self-Made Man: Edith Wharton's Domestic Arrangements
Ruth Bernard Yeazell, 5 April 2007
Edith Wharton's 'background' – the word is her own – has always seemed improbable for a future novelist. Persistent rumours that she was not the daughter of George...
Too late to die early: Virginia Woolf and Harriet Martineaun in the sick room
Ruth Bernard Yeazell, 5 February 2004
In the spring of 1877 T.M. Greenhow, a retired surgeon, published an article in the British Medical Journal on the case of Harriet Martineau, who had died in her house in Ambleside the previous...
Smashing the Teapots
Jacqueline Rose, 23 January 1997
One of the strangest things Virginia Woolf ever did was to travel with Leonard to Germany for part of their annual holiday in April 1935. The vigour of German anti-semitism was by this point...
Janet Todd, 21 December 1989
'Catherised' was how Ernest Hemingway described the portrayal of the Great War in One of Ours by Willa Cather. Despite lifting scenes from the movie Birth of a Nation, it made Cather...
A Reading and Remembrance of Elizabeth Bowen
Sean O'Faolain, 4 March 1982
If there ever was a writer of genius, or neargenius – time will decide – who was heart-cloven and split-minded it is Elizabeth Bowen. Romantic-realist, yearning-sceptic,...