HERMIONE LEE
PENELOPE FITZGERALD: A LIFE (2014)
Winner of the Plutarch Award.
Winner of James Tait Prize for Biography.
New York Times 10 Best Books of the Year
Penelope Fitzgerald was born in 1916 into a literary and creative family. Her father Edmund was editor of Punch magazine. Her uncle Ronald Knox was a theologian and crime writer. Antoher uncle, Dillwyn, was a cryptographer. She graduated with distinction from Somerville College, Oxford. But her life was clouded by her husband Desmond’s alcoholism and conviction for forging cheques.
Her middle life was a sad story of miscellaneous jobs and poverty. She wrote her first book in 1975, at the age of 58. There followed a distinguished literary career, including three biographies and nine novels. Her novel Offshore won the Booker Prize in 1979.
The Financial Times wrote of Lee’s biography of Penelope Fitzgerald: ‘Lee elucidates the depth of [Fitzgerald's] achievement, and ties it enthrallingly to a life and personality more complex and difficult than anyone imagined. In a perfect literary biography, Lee plumbs the creative mind beneath that persona, tracing the metamorphosis of messy experience into crystalline art.’
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Hermoine Lee took a degree in English at St. Hilda’s College, Oxford, and an MPhil at st. Cross College, Oxford. In 1998 she became Goldsmiths’ Professor English Literature at New College, Oxford. She was later President of Wolfson College, Oxford.
As a professional author she whas written nine biographies, as well as two books on the art of biography. The subjects of her biographies include Philip Roth, Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton, and Tom Stoppard.
