3 Quotes & Sayings By Hermione Lee

Hermione Lee is a novelist, journalist and biographer. Her latest book is Queen Victoria: A Life In Letters, which won The Samuel Johnson Prize for Biography in 2016. She has been a columnist for The Guardian, where she worked from 1993 to 2005, writing on topics including art and culture, fiction and film, and fashion. Before that she was a writer on the literary pages of The Independent Read more

She reviewed books for Granta magazine, The Spectator and the New York Times Book Review before becoming a columnist. Her last book was a biography of Mary Shelley called Frankenstein's Daughter.

1
From Tudor to eighteenth-century England, there are many instances of women writers with no place or room of their own. The life-story of the play-wright Elizabeth Cary, Lady Falkland (1585-1639) gives us a dramatic and, lately, much-studied example. In the hagiographical 'The Lady Falkland: Her Life', written by one of her daughters, we hear how the prodigious Elizabethlearnt to read very soon and loved it much.. Without a teacher, whilst she was a child, she learnt French, Spanish, Italian [and] Latin.. She having neither brother nor sister, nor other companion of her age, spent her whole time in reading; to which she gave herself so much that she frequently read all night; so as her mother was fain to forbid her servants to let her have candles, which command they turned to their own profit, and let themselves be hired by her to let her have them, selling them to her at half a crown apiece, so was she bent to reading; and she not having money so free, was to owe it them, and in this fashion was she in debt a hundred pound afore she was twelve year old. Hermione Lee
2
A self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living': so too with the biography of that self. And just as lives don't stay still, so life-writing can't be fixed and finalised. Our ideas are shifting about what can be said, our knowledge of human character is changing. The biographer has to pioneer, going 'ahead of the rest of us, like the miner's canary, testing the atmosphere, detecting falsity, unreality, and the presence of obsolete conventions'. So, 'There are some stories which have to be retold by each generation'. She is talking about the story of Shelley, but she could be talking about her own life-story. (Virginia Woolf, p. 11) . Hermione Lee