Virginia Woolf

The Diary of Virginia Woolf review – a book for the ages

Woolf’s epic and unmatchable record of her life, times and writing process

Hermione Lee
Thursday 22 June 2023

“Imeant to write about death, only life came breaking in as usual,” Virginia Woolf wrote on 17 February 1922, when she had just turned 40. Her diary is full of pain: deaths, losses, illness, grief, depression, anguish, fear. But on every page life breaks in, with astonishing energy, relish and glee. The diary is an unmatchable record of her times, a gallery of vividly observed individuals, an intimate and courageousself-examination, a revelation of a writer’s creative processes, a tender, watchful nature journal, and a meditation on life, love, marriage, friendship, solitude, society, time and mortality. It’s one of the greatest diaries ever written, and it’s excellent to see it back in print.

Hermione Lee / Alice Munro´s Magic

Alice Munro
Illustration by Triunfo Arciniegas

Alice Munro’s Magic

by Hermione Lee

February 5, 2015

Family Furnishings: Selected Stories, 1995–2014
by Alice Munro
Knopf, 620 pp., $30.00

The stories selected in Family Furnishings, a fine and timely follow-up to Alice Munro’s winning of the 2013 Nobel Prize, date (it says on the cover) from 1995 to 2014, thus making a sequel to the Selected Stories of 1996, which drew on the previous thirty years of Munro’s writing. But there is one exception to this dating in the new selection, the magnificent story “Home.” “Home” was first published in a collection of Canadian stories in 1974, so it was written when Munro was in her early forties. She then went on working on it for thirty years, revising, correcting, and changing its shape, and it was republished in much-altered form in 2006: so it appears here as a “late” story. That process of revisiting is fundamental to Munro’s methods. She constantly revises her work; she reuses her subject matter with the utmost concentration and attention; and her characters, like her (and often they are like her), compulsively return to their pasts.

Penelope Fitzgerald / Late Bloom

Penelope Fitzgerald

Penelope Fitzgerald

Late Bloom

Hermione Lee’s biography of the writer Penelope Fitzgerald.

By James Wood

November 24, 2014

Fitzgerald seemed set for early success, and yet published her first novel in her sixties.

Illustration by Conor Langton

“A very definite place.” So Penelope Fitzgerald described the English town of Southwold, on the Suffolk coast—a place of wet winds, speeding clouds, and withdrawn beauty where she and her family moved in 1957, when she was forty-one. It is a characteristic phrase, from a writer of a very definite prose, with sharp outlines and a distinctly high-handed economy. Modern literature is mostly written not by aristocrats but by the middle classes. A certain class confidence, not to say imperiousness, can be heard in well-born writers like Nabokov and Henry Green; Tolstoy’s famous line about Ivan Ilyich—“Ivan Ilyich’s life had been most simple and most ordinary, and therefore most terrible”—represents surely a count’s hauteur as much as a religious moralist’s lament. Fitzgerald was not exactly an aristocrat (her forebears were scholars and intellectuals), or exactly gentry (they were religiously wary of money and possessions), but she came from a brilliant and eminent family, with long connections to both the Church of England and Oxford University, and the tone of command is everywhere in her writing.

Michael Dirda reviews ‘Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life,’ by Hermione Lee

Penelope Fitzgerald

Michael Dirda reviews ‘Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life,’ by Hermione Lee

By Michael Dirda

December 31, 2014

On New Year’s Day we all think about fresh starts and new directions. But few of us will ever manage such dramatic rebirths as did Penelope Fitzgerald (1916-2000), who never published a book until she was just shy of 60 — yet became one of Britain’s most admired novelists. Her tragicomic masterpieces, such as “The Beginning of Spring” and “The Blue Flower,” are concise, beautifully composed accounts of ordinary people stoically facing up to life’s confusions and defeats. In several ways, the contemporary American writer Fitzgerald most resembles is Marilynne Robinson. She’s that good, that distinctive, albeit with a far livelier sense of the human comedy.

'Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life,' by Hermione Lee / Review by Meganne Fabrega

Penelope Fitzgerald in 1999
Photo by Ellen Warner

Review: 'Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life,' by Hermione Lee

A biography of the late-blooming but brilliant writer Penelope Fitzgerald.

By Meganne Fabrega 

December 11, 2014

"Her life is basically a short story about lateness," writes acclaimed biographer Hermione Lee of Penelope Fitzgerald, the British novelist, biographer, teacher, mother and wife who did not find commercial success until she was well into middle age. With "Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life," Lee's exhaustive research and immense storytelling talent result in a captivating read about a woman who lived most of her life on the sidelines.

Penelope Fitzgerald / A Life by Hermione Lee / Review by Robert McCrum

Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life by Hermione Lee – review

Hermione Lee writes passionately about a novelist whose brilliant career began at the age of 60

Robert McCrum

Sunday 17 November 2013

T

he novelist Penelope Fitzgerald endured a life of two unequal halves, of failure followed by success. Put them together – as Hermione Lee has done in this brilliant and passionate biography – and you find a haunting tale of blighted hope, personal tragedy and rare, late fulfilment.

Vogue / The 10 Best Books of 2014

The 10 Best Books of 2014

Megan O'Grady
DECEMBER 26, 2014 11:00 AM

Perhaps no novel this year was more feverishly anticipated—or more frequently stolen from my desk—than Elena Ferrante’s Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay (Europa), the third installment of the enigmatic Italian author’s Neapolitan novels, which tell a single story with the possessive force of an origin myth. Now in their 30s, the two women at its center—a writer losing her way; a defiant former classmate drawn into a revolutionary movement—face the consequences of their limited choices, raising issues of ambition and identity, creativity and desire.

An immigrant story like no other, Akhil Sharma’s memoir-like second novel,Family Life (Norton), follows a family from India to America, where tragedy soon derails their dreams. Written in the kind of prose that gets under your skin and never really leaves, it’s also the story of how a writer is made.

Based on Margaret Mead’s experience in 1930s New Guinea, Lily King’s brainy and sensuous Euphoria (Atlantic) spins a love triangle in the bush. Wearing her research lightly, King reveals a startlingly vulnerable side to Mead, suggesting an elegant parallel between novelist and archeologist: In scrutinizing the lives of others, we discover ourselves.

Featuring his strongest female character since Atonement’s Briony, Ian McEwan’s The Children Act (Nan A. Talese) infuses a classic showdown between faith and reason with unexpected tenderness. Grounded in the story of a family court judge facing the decision of her career—one with unexpected repercussions for her personal life—McEwan’s thirteenth novel is taut, spellbinding, and unaccountably romantic.

The fiction debut of the year was Katy Simpson Smith’s The Story of Land and Sea (Harper), a feat of historical ventriloquism that movingly evokes the voices of two women on a North Carolina plantation during the American Revolution—one white, one black—for whom the fight for liberty and sovereignty take very different forms.

Softer than its preceding two volumes but still impossibly addictive, Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle, Book 3 (Archipelago), recalls the ordinary magic—girls, rock music, and the thrill of a new parka—of an otherwise austere Nordic boyhood.

Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation (Knopf) begins as a scrapbook of crackling insights into the effect of motherhood on the creative life, but soon deepens into something much richer and more complex as the narrator discovers her husband’s infidelity. A shattering rejoinder to smug mommy blogs, Offill’s portrait of marriage is as raw and honest as any in recent memory.

An unlikely connection between a young drifter and an elderly reverend sparks Marilynne Robinson’s third novel set in the Midwestern town of Gilead, Lila(FSG), which unfolds into a theological inquiry both tender and painful, capturing the comforts and the limits of faith and love.

Eight years old when the Islamic Revolution remade her world, former New York Times correspondent Nazila Fathi distills three decades of Iranian politics through a personal lens in her unputdownable memoir, The Lonely War (Basic Books).

In a year that saw a number of landmark biographies of the famous and infamous —A. N. Wilson’s Victoria: A Life, John Lahr’s Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh—it was Hermione Lee’s biography of an elusive English novelist who published her first book at 58 that kept surprising us. Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life (Knopf) captures the tribulations of The Blue Flower author, and the power of a voice forged lately, and brilliantly.

VOGUE