Hermione Lee

Hermione Lee is a British literary biographer and critic, widely regarded as one of the finest English-language practitioners of literary biography. Born in 1948, she was educated at Oxford and has taught at York, Oxford, and Princeton. She was Goldsmiths' Professor of English Literature at Oxford and President of Wolfson College. Her biographies include studies of Virginia Woolf (1996), Edith Wharton (2007), Tom Stoppard (2020), and Penelope Fitzgerald (2013), the last of which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Biography. She is also the author of critical works on Elizabeth Bowen and Philip Roth, and has edited collections on biography and women's writing. Lee is known for her scrupulous research, elegant prose, and psychological insight into her subjects. Her biography of Virginia Woolf has been called definitive. She was made CBE in 2003 and Dame in 2013, and is a Fellow of the British Academy.