“hermione lee”

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 f... More

From the award-winning biographer of Virginia Woolf and Willa Cather comes a brilliant, long-awaited reexamination of an iconic American woman of letters. Lucid and acute . . . with a thoroughness no other Wharton biography has yet achieved--"Los Angeles Times."From Hermione Lee, the internationally... More

Cather is usually read as a nostalgic celebrator of the American past. Lee explores a stranger and more complex Cather, whose life and work are rife with split identities, sexual conflicts and stoic fatalism. Illustrated.... More

"This book shows why Hermione Lee is a star among British biographers. Generous, witty, provocative, and blissfully free of academic jargon, it takes us into the heart of the current debate about the nature and value of life writing. Lee's meticulous readings constantly give rise to the largest, mos... More

Willa Cather, author of "My Antonia" and "O Pioneers " and widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers, has also been dismissed in certain circles as a sentimental nostalgist, a grumpy critic of the modern world. Hermione Lee offers an alternative interpretation of a writer whose life an... More

Hermione Lee sees Virginia Woolf afresh, in her historical setting and as a vital figure for our times. Her book moves freely between a richly detailed life-story and new attempts to understand crucial questions - the impact of her childhood, the cause and nature of her madness and suicide, the trut... More

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 o... More