Hermione Lee Visits Auckland and Sydney Hermione Lee will be a featured guest and presenter at several upcoming events in Auckland and Sydney during the month of May. For each of the events listed below, please visit the festival website for additional information about the programs or to book tickets to the events. For recent reviews of her biography of Edith Wharton, please visit the Wharton webpage at: www.hermionelee.com/wharton

Auckland Writers & Readers Festival Books on the Box Wednesday 14 May 6:00 - 7:00pm An Hour with Hermione Lee: The Michael King Memorial Lecture Saturday 17 May 11:30am - 12:30pm Edith Wharton and the Young Stalin Sunday 18 May 1:00 - 2:00pm (To verify event information and to book tickets, please visit the event website at www.writersfestival.co.nz) Sydney Writers' Festival 2008 Conflicting Desires: A New Reading of Edith Wharton Monday, May 19 2008 13:30 - 14:30 Carrington Hotel, Katoomba Hermione Lee on Edith Wharton Thursday, May 22 2008 11:30 - 12:30 Sydney Theatre at Walsh Bay Hermione Lee in Conversation Friday, May 23 2008 10:00 - 11:00 Sydney Theatre at Walsh Bay The Lives of Others Saturday, May 24 2008 14:00 - 15:00 Sydney Theatre at Walsh Bay (To verify event information and to book tickets, please visit www.swf.org.au)

Hermione Lee has been elected President of Wolfson College Oxford Professor Lee will take up office on 1 October 2008. Since 1998 she has been the Goldsmiths' Professor of English Literature and the first woman professorial Fellow of New College. Visit the Wolfson College website for more information. Hermione Lee on being elected to the Presidency: 'I am delighted and honoured to have been elected to the Presidency of Wolfson College, an institution which since its foundation by Sir Isaiah Berlin in the 1960s has represented some of the best and most forward-looking aspects of Oxford education. It is a non-hierarchical, friendly, international and lively graduate college, a striking modern building in a beautiful riverside setting. Though I shall be sad to stand down from the Goldsmiths Chair, a post in which I have had ten rewarding and fruitful years, and though I hope to maintain my links with the Oxford English Faculty and to keep up my activities as a writer and critic, I look forward to taking on the new challenge of leading, representing, and working for the College.'

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. She was appointed in 1998 to the Goldsmiths' Chair of English Literature and Fellow of New College at the University of Oxford. She 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. Her new biography of Edith Wharton is now available in paperback from Vintage. Order from Vintage or from Amazon.co.uk.   Edith Wharton A biography by Hermione Lee Click here to learn more or to read the reviews.

Additional News: 'Pawed, used, loved and lonely.' The Guardian, 1 March 2008 [Rev. of Taking Pictures by Anne Enright]. Edith Wharton has been short listed for the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography. Edith Wharton was selected as one of the Washington Post and The Economist's 10 best books of 2007. Edith Wharton was selected as one of the NYTBR and Publishers' Weekly 100 best books of 2007. Hermione Lee Interviews Philip Roth: 'Age Makes a Difference', The New Yorker 83.29 (October 1, 2007): 56-62 [On the publication of Roth's novel Exit Ghost]. Hermione Lee has been given an Honorary Doctorate from the University of York. Lee was presented her honorary degree by Hugh Haughton, of the Department of English and Related Literature, on 12 July.

Order Edith Wharton online via Vintage, Chatto & Windus, Alfred A. Knopf, Random House Canada, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.com, or from a variety of quality independent booksellers through localbookshops.co.uk or Book Sense.

    

A rich new life of a great novelist. The first biography of Edith Wharton by a British woman writer, it challenges the accepted view, showing Wharton's lifelong ties to Europe and displaying her as a tough, erotically brave, startlingly modern writer and woman.

The name 'Edith Wharton' conjures up 'Gilded Age' New York, in all its snobbery and ruthlessness - the world of The Age of Innocence and The House of Mirth. This major new biography upsets the stereotype. This Edith Wharton is not the genteel, nostalgic chronicler of a vanished age but a fiercely modern author, writing of sex, love, money and war - a woman of strong convictions and conflicting ambitions and desires.

Born in 1862 during the Civil War, Wharton broke away from her wealthy background and travelled extensively and adventurously in Europe, eventually settling in Paris. During the First World War she committed herself heroically to war-work and lived in France, her 'second country', until her death in 1937. She created fabulous homes in New England and France, and her life was filled with remarkable friends, including Henry James, Bernard Berenson, Aldous Huxley and Kenneth Clark. She ran her professional life with energy, writing on her travels and on Italian villas and gardens, and publishing poetry, plays, essays and short stories as well as her powerful novels. But Wharton had her secrets, including a passionate secret mid-life love affair. She was unhappily married, childless and divorced, and knew loneliness and anguish. Her brilliant, disturbing fiction shows her deep understanding of the longing and struggle in women's lives.

This masterly biography delves into every aspect of Wharton's extraordinary life-story. It shifts the emphasis towards Europe and places her more clearly than ever before in her social context and her history. In particular, it shows in fascinating detail how she worked and what lies at the heart of her magnificent and subtle books.

Order Edith Wharton online via Vintage, Chatto & Windus, Alfred A. Knopf, Random House Canada, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.com, or from a variety of quality independent booksellers through localbookshops.co.uk or Book Sense.

Click here to learn more or to read the reviews.