NYSL: Hermione Lee on "Edith Wharton"

Описание: http://www.nysoclib.org/notes/2012/ed...

Hermione Lee won international acclaim and awards for her biographies of Virginia Woolf and Willa Cather, and her Edith Wharton (2007) is considered the definitive modern biography of one of America's most famous women of letters.

Delving into heretofore untapped sources, Lee does away with the image of the snobbish bluestocking and gives us a new Wharton - tough, startlingly modern, as brilliant and complex as her fiction. Born into a wealthy family, Wharton left America as an adult and eventually chose to create a life in France. Her renowned novels and stories have become classics of American literature, but as Lee shows, Wharton's own life, filled with success and scandal, was as intriguing as those of her heroines. Bridging two centuries and two very different sensibilities, Wharton here comes to life in the skillful hands of one of the great literary biographers of our time.

Hermione Lee grew up in London and was educated at Oxford. She began her academic career as a lecturer in Williamsburg, Virginia (Instructor, 1970-1971) and at Liverpool University (Lecturer, 1971-1977). She taught at the University of York from 1977, where over twenty years she was Lecturer, Senior Lecturer, Reader, and Professor of English Literature. From 1998-2008 she was the Goldsmiths' Chair of English Literature and Fellow of New College at the University of Oxford. In 2008 Lee was elected President of Wolfson College, University of Oxford.

Lee is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a Fellow of the British Academy and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and an Honorary Fellow of St Hilda's and St Cross Colleges, Oxford. She has Honorary Doctorates from Liverpool and York Universities. In 2003 she was made a Companion of the British Empire for Services to Literature.