Hermione Lee Books In Order

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Publication Order of Very Short Introductions Books

Publication Order of Anthologies

Hermione Lee is a British published author of nonfiction and biography.

Hermione Lee was born in the United Kingdom on February 29, 1948, in Winchester. She would spend her time growing up in London, going on to attend school at Oxford. Her father worked as a G.P. and she would attend different schools in the city. Hermione attended the French Lycée before moving on to the City of London School for Girls and then Queen’s College. Hermione would also take an English literature first class degree at St. Hilda’s College Oxford in 1968 before getting her Masters in Philosophy in 1970 from St. Cross College. The author belongs to both colleges as an honorary fellow and is also an honorary fellow at New College.

She would then go on to lecture in the United States at Williamsburg, Virginia, at the College of William & Mary. She would stay there as an instructor for a year before relocating to lecture at Liverpool University for six years from 1971 to 1977. Hermione would teach at the University of York starting in 1977 where she was Professor of English Literature as well as the lecturer, senior lecturer, and reader. Hermione would then serve as the Goldsmiths’ Chair of English Literature for a decade starting in 1998 (where she was also an Emeritus Professor of English Literature) as well as the University of Oxford’s Fellow of New College. She was the first to be a woman fellow there. She was elected to be the President of Wolfson College at the University of Oxford in 2008, holding the position until 2017.

Lee is now a Fellow of the British Academy and a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences as well as the Royal Society of Literature. The author has also had the distinction of being awarded Honorary Doctorates from York University and Liverpool University. She was given the title of Commander of the British Empire in 2003 for her ‘services to literature’ and awarded the title of Dame in 2013 for her work in literary scholarship. That same year, King’s College London gave her an Honorary Fellowship. Lee also is a Trustee of the Wolfson Foundation.

Lee is known for her critical evaluation of literature as well as her work as a biographer. Over the course of her career, she has written biographies chronicling the lives and works of authors such as Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton, Philip Roth, Elizabeth Bowen, Willa Cather, and Penelope Fitzgerald. Her book on Fitzgerald would win the James Tait Black Prize in 2014 for a biography and would be named one of the top ten books of 2014 by the New York Times.

Lee has won several awards for her work, including the English Speaking Union Ambassador Prize, the US Plutarch Prize, Biographers’ Club Prize, and lots of recognition. She has also written several introductions to books and has edited many of them, including the Oxford Poets Anthologies (1999-2002). She is married to John Barnard, a professor, and they reside in Oxford as well as Yorkshire.

Lee has also appeared in the media in addition to being featured in it, presenting the “Book Four” t.v. program on books for Channel Four TV from 1982 to 1986. Lee was 2006’s Man Booker Prize’s Chair of the Judges for fiction and was appointed Chair of the David Cohen Prize for literature in 2020. The author founded Wolfson College’s Oxford Centre for Life-Writing in 2012, which offered workshops, seminars, lectures, day schools, conferences and more.

Hermione Lee has also been a visiting teaching fellow at Yale University’s library, a Whitney J. Oates Fellow at Princeton’s Council for the Humanities, to the University of Indiana in Bloomington’s Lilly Library as an Everett Helm visiting fellow, and a fellow to the Cullman Center at the New York Public Library. She has given seminars at the University of Columbia, the University of Cambridge, the University of Edinburgh, CUNY, and the Liverpool Literary Festival. The Biographers International Organization awarded her The Bio Award for her work in advancing biography.

Tom Stoppard: A Life is a book from author Hermione Lee. It was published by Faber & Faber in 2020. If you enjoy reading biographies, are a fan of Lee’s work, or just want to find out more about Tom Stoppard, this book is a must read.

Readers will find a portrait of the playwright carefully built by Lee as they flip through the pages of this fascinating biography. The author has access like no one before to many private documents of Stoppard’s. Private papers, letters, diaries, and interviews are all featured as Lee explores the life of this artist.

The biography is also enhanced through long conversations that have been had with the playwright himself. Journey through his origins in the Czech republic and growing up as a child in India. Follow the many homes he resided in, the schools that he studied at, the writing he did, the films and the plays that he worked on.

This is the tale of a unique and interesting man with many complexities, and takes readers further into his private life than ever before done. Read Tom Stoppard to get the full scope of this work!

Reading In Bed is a book that captures the first lecture done by Professor Lee. Here she looks more deeply into topics, in particular women’s reading and its history and what 20th century female writers read, when they did much of their reading in their home.

Follow along and discover how reading has held an importance in the lives of so many writers and a special place in their memories from childhood. Whether they did it openly or as a secret escape, something that no one else knew about, this is the history of the Western world and its relationship with reading, especially when it comes to women.

The book also touches upon censorship, prohibition, and thoughts about the ‘proper’ way to read, along with subversive reading and more from the past to current day. Find out how women’s reading has been attempted to be regulated, their responses to this, and more, all while learning more about famous female writers from history.