Hermione Lee

This summary may suggest to modern ears a cut-and-dried tale of goodies and baddies, but the motivations of all the central characters are mixed, and a large cast of subsidiary characters enacts complexity where a...

While spinsters are again perceived as lonely, self-pitying, garrulous, defensive in the eyes of some, the heroine here defies such a one-sided image. Leonard Woolf found Mary Jocelyn very reserved...

Her biographer Hermione Lee has said: she was writing away like mad in her teens and early twenties. Then this powerful stream disappeared underground, until up it comes, this underground river, at the age of...

Hermione Lee points out that in this year—a typical one, though broken by illness—Woolf's productivity included making final pre-publication revisions to a novel and an essay collection, beginning work on another novel, writing eight...

Later reprints often appeared as The Common Reader, First Series. VW took her title from a formulation of Samuel Johnson 's, meaning that non-specialist, non-academic reader to whose taste, said Johnson, he was always...

JS wrote the novel while staying with her aunt Dorothy Bussy 's family at Roquebrune in France, informally separated from her first husband, Stephen Tomlin . After finishing her manuscript, she sent...

WC was a tireless letter-writer, and also kept a diary. She did not want her letters to be published, allegedly because she thought them too spontaneous and unpolished.Hermione Lee refers to reading, at...

VW did not discuss this incident specifically until the last years of her life. Hermione Lee , who considers the matter as fully as possible, argues that it would be rash to ignore or belittle...