Book description
As readers, we seem to be increasingly fascinated by studies of
individual lives. In this timely, unusual and exhilarating collection
Hermione Lee is concerned in different ways with approaches to
'life-writing': the relation of biography to fiction and history; the
exploration of writers' lives in connection with their works; the new
and changing ways in which biographies, memoirs, diaries and
autobiographies can be discussed.
As the title suggests, she also unravels the complex links between
physical, sensual details and the 'body' of a work. 'Shelley's Heart
and Pepys' Lobsters', for example, deals with myths, contested objects
and things that go missing, while 'Jane Austen Faints' takes five
varied accounts of the same dramatic moment to ask how biography deals
with the private lives of famous women, a theme taken up in 'Virginia
Woolf's Nose', on the way that the author's life-stories have been
transformed into fiction and film.
Rich, diverting and entertaining, these brilliant studies by a
leading critic and internationally acclaimed biographer raise profound
and intriguing issues about every aspect of writing, and reading, a life.
Hermione Lee's previous books include the biographical studies
Elizabeth Bowen
and
Willa Cather,
the internationally acclaimed biography
Virginia Woolf
, and
Edith Wharton
, longlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize. She is a well-known reviewer
and broadcaster, and, in 2006, Chair of the judges for the Man Booker
Prize. She is the first woman Goldsmiths' Professor of English at Oxford
University, a Fellow of New College, Oxford, of the British Academy and
of the Royal Society of Literature. She was awarded a CBE in 2003 for
services to literature.
